Advertising powers a booming mobile games market, but commercial and regulatory hurdles are forcing marketers to rethink their strategies.

Personalised marketing is one of the most effective ways to maximise user acquisition efforts in a highly saturated market. However, Apple’s updates in the use of the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) gives its users increased control over the privacy of their data, making personalised advertising much harder for advertisers to use.

What do these changes mean for advertisers?

The IDFA is an identifier assigned to a user’s device used to track and identify them without revealing their personal information. Apple’s IDFA changes will require mobile app publishers to ask for user permission for tracking and accessing device identifiers. The new transparency framework requires, for example, that the IDFA is turned off by default and easier to find in the device settings.

Google has since similarly adjusted its own privacy features with its Android Advertising ID. The impact of these changes are expected to be far-reaching, with Facebook suggesting it could reduce advertiser revenues by 50%.

Sensor Tower reports[1] that despite concerns about the impact of the IDFA changes, many mobile game advertising networks are in fact seeing an uptick in the effectiveness of advertising, but acknowledges that the long-term impacts are yet to be seen.

Are there any changes from a regulatory perspective?

The UK Government is consulting on increasing regulatory oversight into paid-for online advertising through its launch of the Online Advertising Programme (OAP).

The OAP aims to tackle the ‘evident lack of transparency and accountability across the whole supply chain’, as the Government has deemed that the Advertising Standards Authority’s self-regulatory model has failed to adequately address the rapid growth of digital advertising.  For more information on the OAP, click here.

This consultation stands to affect the online advertising sector and every part of the industry should be keeping this on their radar.

This article was first published as part of our “Expert insight on advertising, marketing & sponsorship” publication. Read insights on similar topics in the full publication here. 

[1] https://sensortower.com/blog/state-of-mobile-game-advertising-report-2021