Google Is Coming For The Mobile ID; Retail Media FTW
This is the FirstPartyCapital weekly newsletter. It covers news and updates about the FirstPartyCapital fund and its portfolio companies.
Google is coming for the mobile ID, and it’s going to get messy for those unprepared
FirstPartyCapital is hearing from a bunch of industry insiders that Google is due to launch its own flavour of the ATT (App Tracking Transparency) framework. Its arrival is imminent.
Apple has been using ATT as a key marketing tool, positioning itself as the privacy-first platform. Hard to know if it is moving the needle. But Google and partners using Android are not keen to give up any market share to Apple - particularly that affluent market.. So this is not an unexpected move.
But isn’t this a classic Google anti-competitive move? Google will likely deny itself access to the same universal id - unless it is an actual Google phone. Those running forked versions of Android on their physical phone products will own the ids - a bonanza for Samsung et al.
Now you are probably getting angry about Google running roughshod over the industry AGAIN. But we have seen this over and over and over - and yet people expect a different result from Google. They cling to the hope G will do you a favor.
The industry right now reminds me of Tom Hanks in Cast Away, clinging to wreckage in the open ocean, hoping to get back to civilization. Tom’s character ultimately ended up alone on a deserted island with his friend Wilson, a punctured football, slowly going mad.
The way out of this mess is reinvestment in measurement and targeting that are not reliant on legacy 3p cookies and ids.
Retail Media FTW
FirstPartyCapital has been having a lot of conversations of late about the huge potential of retail media (commerce media). Amazon has been generating huge amounts of revenue by placing ads on Amazon.com, tying outcomes to ad spend.
The spend Amazon is tapping into is not social, display or search. It is instead the trade budgets that traditionally went to retailers for in-store and omni channel marketing activity. Brands are now pushing this spend to Amazon.
The good news is that while Amazon literally owns the US ecom market, it is not nearly as strong internationally. There is a huge opportunity for marketplaces, retailers and ad tech to access this growing marketing budget.
The space is currently a mess: endless fragmentation, poor targeting and a broken attribution model. FirstPartyCapital believes this will be a massive area of growth as the middle market retailers and marketplace light up their ad business.
We are a big investor in this space. Two of our portfolio companies (Cavai and Cario) are building creative ad tech infrastructure and attribution capabilities. And will have more investments coming in the space this year. Exciting times to be in ad tech.
The NSA Is Not Watching You Anymore: CNIL Bans Google Analytics In France
In a fairly seismic ruling this week, CNIL has ordered all websites in France to stop using Google Analytics within 30 days.
CNIL states that the data collection and transfers to the United States using Google Analytics “are illegal,” violating Article 44 of the GDPR.
Nobody knows how they will enforce this? Will they send angry letters to 120,958 websites (a lot of stamps and stationery) demanding they stop using Google Analytics. This all seems a little ludicrous and stems from a court ruling that struck down the existing data transfer arrangement between the U.S. and EU, known as the Privacy Shield, on the grounds that the EU could not be certain its data would be safe from U.S. government surveillance once housed in data centres on American soil.
If this does not get resolved, we could see some US-based MadTech companies leaving the market. Wouldn’t it be easy just to house data in Europe, avoiding any perceived GDPR violations?
European-based ad tech companies look to be in a good spot if this rumbles on. And who invests in European ad startups? That’s right, reader, FirstPartyCapital.
Deals Live On The FirstPartyCapital Platform
Evorra: The perfect application of “clean room” technology to a real world problem, moving a $200 billion data market into the privacy-first era …
Passendo: The leading category tech vendor in the email ad server space that just raised a pre-series A €2.3 million round …
The FirstPartyCapital fund: A $15 million fund investing in the next wave of innovative ad tech, martech and digital media startups, predominantly at the seed stage…
Open Roles At FPC Portfolio Companies
Passendo, Advertising Sales Manager, UK - https://apply.workable.com/passendo/j/7A99F8C481/
Passendo, Advertising Sales Manager, US - https://apply.workable.com/passendo/j/2B5EE89B87/