Alibaba looking for ways to protect its ad business against Apple’s ATT

As many companies that make up a significant portion of their overall revenue from their advertising biz, Alibaba is looking for ways to minimize the impact of Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework.

According to The Information, Alibaba invited half a dozen marketing industry executives to its headquarters in Hangzhou in order to discuss how the company and its advertising partners can protect their revenue against Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework. 

According to the report, however, the Chinese e-commerce giant has not reached a consensus on how to cope with the matter. 

Alibaba had already been grappling with new restrictions imposed by a group of Chinese top regulators on what type of personal data internet companies can collect. 

In late March, the Cyberspace Administration, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly released a document that bans apps from collecting excessive user data starting May 1. 

China is one of Apple’s largest markets, with over 300 million active iPhones in the country, and 40% of Alibaba’s revenue comes from advertising business.

Alibaba is not the only company affected by Apple’s privacy policy and trying to eliminate this impact. Facebook said it expects a significant drop in its ad business which was the biggest source of revenue in the first quarter due to Apple’s ATT. 

According to a leaked Facebook memo released by Insider, 

• 1-day click-through opt-out data will be modeled for advertisers.
• 7-day click-through and 1-day view-through attribution settings will no longer include iOS 14.5 opted-out events.
• 28-day click-through, 7-day view-through, 28-day view-through attribution tools will no longer be available to advertisers.

TikTok also outlined ad campaign changes due to the ATT framework. 

Unity Software Inc. and Snap Inc have also been accusing Apple of being anticompetitive and they said the ATT framework could risk their ad businesses.