Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Sensitive To The Touch
Meta is preparing major changes in 2025 to what it calls “sensitive” classes of advertisers, including health and wellness brands, financial services and politics.
Advertisers began receiving notifications from Meta last week that they will face new restrictions on data sharing in January.
Foxwell Digital has a useful rundown on what we know about the changes so far – which is not much. For example, it remains unknown exactly how Meta will apply its new policies, just that advertisers have been warned about partial or full data sharing restrictions.
However, one consequence for advertisers in those sensitive categories will be full or partial removal from the Meta Conversions API.
Wait! What?
That’s right. Those advertisers will not be able to sync their Meta Business analytics or ad campaigns to any conversions or engagements that come from their own sites or apps. The most granular metric available will be the number of clicks from the ad to the landing page.
Without direct response metrics, “sensitive” advertisers will be forced into upper-funnel metrics.
“Please note that this change may impact your campaign performance,” Meta wrote in its notification email blast.
Lol.
The Politics Of Brand Safety
The ad industry’s brand safety efforts may become a political target under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Thursday that he’s investigating the World Federation of Advertisers and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) for leading an alleged politically motivated scheme among advertisers to boycott certain social media platforms.
Paxton accuses GARM of pushing advertising guidelines that were not based on legitimate brand safety concerns, but rather political differences with conservative-leaning platforms like X and Rumble.
“Although companies are free to choose when and where they want to advertise,” Paxton’s announcement reads, “a conspiracy among companies along these lines can result in harm to competition.”
However, GARM is already kaput, having been sued into oblivion by X owner Elon Musk back in August.
Critics accused Paxton of trying to curry favor with Musk, one of Trump’s closest advisors, and with the president-elect himself. In fact, Paxton’s announcement came the same day Trump’s initial pick for US Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration. Unfortunately for Paxton, Trump promptly nominated former Florida AG Pam Bondi in Gaetz’s stead.
Either way, the investigation bodes ill for advertiser efforts to demonetize misinformation and hate speech.
Cloudy With A Chance Of Antitrust
TFW the CMA thinks you’re probably a browser monopolist, but clears you for anticompetitive behavior related to cloud gaming.
On Friday, an independent inquiry group within the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally concluded in a new report that the CMA should investigate Apple for policies that “are holding back innovation” in the web and mobile browser market, 9 to 5 Mac reports.
The inquiry group also notes that the revenue-sharing agreement between Google and Apple may be illegal because it “significantly reduces their financial incentives to compete in mobile browsers on iOS.” Google pays Apple roughly $20 billion every year to be the default search engine in Safari.
What does it all mean? At the very least, Apple will likely have to start letting users choose their default web browser when initially setting up a new iPhone, an action it was already forced to take in the EU.
But here’s an interesting development: The inquiry group is proposing that the CMA takes no further action on mobile cloud gaming since Apple now allows cloud gaming apps to be sold via the App Store.
But Wait, There’s More!
Meta loses its appeal against the Supreme Court, leaving it open to an investor lawsuit about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. [Bloomberg]
Programmatic company SmartHub has rebranded itself to Attekmi. [ExchangeWire]
Cybercriminals are uploading playlists and podcasts to Spotify with malware and cheat codes hidden inside the descriptions. [404 Media]
Italy’s data protection authority has fined delivery app Foodinho $5.2 million for illegally processing the data of more than 35,000 riders. [Reuters]
