The iOS 14.5 ATT effect

According to Flurry analytics, just 5% of US audiences have allowed App Tracking on their updated Apple iOS devices. The number doubles to around 11% globally.

It is patently clear that audiences are done with tracking and have put privacy over everything else. Not just in the US but globally. One must understand that the level of privacy-firstness is still a propagating phenomenon through other markets where the US and EU lead and the other markets lag behind.

While Facebook might argue that this is a very bad idea for small businesses (as they have done multiple times over), the fact is the opposite is true.

Especially when it comes to digital, there is a myth that personalized ads work.

But almost all personalization is done NOT by small businesses. In fact, most personalization is driven by large brands. Small businesses lack the budgets and the sophisticated talent and tech to actually drive truly customized and personalized ads.

While Google and Facebook have hitherto built hugely granular identity graphs of you and me, the level of usage of this other targeting audiences based on interests, geo and psychographics is very minimal for the vast majority of small business advertisers.

The new update is a welcome change for the very businesses that Facebook and Google purportedly advocate. For it levels the playing field between the Small business with minimal tech savvy and sophistication and the much larger ones that have all the sophistication and media monies to eclipse all local eyeballs and thumb scrolls.

The era of a level playing field has just started and those brands that can truly build resonance through better first-party data centric storytelling will now have an equal chance to connect with audiences as much as the ones that have huge war chests of data-driven media dollars to boot.

Hooray to iOS 14.5. Resonant welcomes it. Welcome to the era of privacy-first brand storytelling.