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Polly Wong, president of Belardi Wong, a direct-to-consumer marketing agency, manages more than 300 brands and millions of dollars of ad spend on Meta’s apps each month. Wong’s brands run the gamut from apparel to luxury goods to home décor, the types of marketers that make up the bulk of Meta’s ad base; marketers like Evereve, a regional fashion retailer, and Lulu and Georgia, a home goods seller. Belardi Wong is helping brands with new marketing strategies after Apple’s privacy changes. The answer, so far, has not been a push into the metaverse, it’s been more about back-to-basics; Belardi Wong’s brands are sending more print catalogs to homes. Performance marketing looks more like it did 20 years ago, where brands are spreading money to more channels and using old-fashioned methods of measurement that don’t hinge on complete access to consumer data.
Since Apple’s changes, which were mostly felt starting last year with the release of iOS 14.5, there has been “diminished targeting, diminished marketing, and diminished effectiveness,” Wong said in a recent phone interview, “all at the same time, while having double-digit increases in the cost of advertising.”
The response to the dramatic changes in performance, particularly on Meta’s apps, has been to try new platforms such as TikTok and buy into connected TV, where there are more ad-supported services and data to track ads, too. Also, “believe it or not catalogs are having an incredible resurgence,” Wong said. “All of our clients are in the mail for both customer retention and new customer acquisition.”
“Retention” and “acquisition” have been the specialty of Meta’s apps for years, since they became one of the most efficient ad engines ever built. App advertisers, from mobile game developers to subscription food delivery services, have used Facebook and Instagram ads to unlock growth. Then Apple basically started preventing apps from following consumers who saw ads, to eventual purchases and other activity online. That “conversion” data has been lost, so marketers can’t analyze their ad spend as accurately. The lack of clarity forced marketers to experiment more and not just trust that Meta would deliver results. Apple’s moves are part of a privacy sea change that has made it more difficult to follow any consumer tracks online.
Meta has viewed Apple’s control over iPhones, and customers, as a direct threat to its business, and that’s partly why the company set out to develop the metaverse strategy. In that next computing platform, Meta won’t necessarily have to rely on Apple’s iPhones to reach consumers. Meanwhile, TikTok, run by Chinese-owned ByteDance, is eating into Facebook and Instagram, too. These converging forces are having an effect on Meta’s business. In the second quarter, Meta’s ad revenue declined year over year for the first time in more than a decade. Ad sales were down 1% year over year to $28.8 billion. Meta will deliver third-quarter results on Oct. 26.
Wong shared stats that showed her brands spent 19% less on Meta apps this year through August, compared to last year. The price of ads on Meta was up about 23% to $16.15, from January to August this year, compared to the same period last year, Wong said. Every advertiser has a different experience depending on the product, region, and marketing tactics they use; so one agency is not necessarily indicative of the whole ad platform. For its part, Meta executives said in the second quarter that the price per ad decreased 14% year over year on average.
Wong said that her brands still spend 10 times more on Meta than on TikTok, which is only now developing an ad business. Meta’s “performance five” tips also have an answer for TikTok. Meta is pushing a new ad format called Creators for Direct Response, which recruits talented video-makers to sell products and services.
