Inspiration

In the first quarter of 2022, Apple's internal data shows that Search Ads had a 62.1% average conversion rate for iOS 15 users with Personalized Ads turned on versus 62.5% for iOS 15 users with Personalized Ads turned off across all countries and regions where Search Ads are available.

“All of a sudden you realize, oh my god, so much of my business is dependent on Instagram because I've put so much time here because this is where brands are spending their money.”

Starling Bank’s December boycott of Facebook and Instagram caused ‘no noticeable decline’ in marketing performance. The bank has said it will not return until Meta cracks down on financial fraudsters using its platforms.

“We will only be partnering with a select few brands we truly love this year, and eventually phasing out of ads altogether.”

The Austrian Data Protection Authority has decided on a model case by noyb that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR. Similar decisions are expected in other EU member states.

“I made a change in trajectory and in the way I approached IG.”

For example, how many of us open an email we’re subscribed to just to find the unsubscribe button? Yet brands and businesses count that as a win.

“I found myself more anxious, more depressed and more on edge when I would come back from a month long hiatus from Instagram.”

“I just thought ‘That’s their own research and they’re ignoring it and we are attracting people to their platform.’ We had no choice whatsoever. Lush attracts an awful lot of girls of that age.” – Lush’s CEO.

“...because they spread hate speech and misinformation about climate change and our democracy. We continue to stand by that boycott 16 months later.”

Demonstrating that their switch from behavioural ads as a publisher remains good for business.

When compared to tracking-based ads over a 12 month period.

They may be a little less profitable. But you know, it’s like—is that extra profit worth all this societal impact and problems? We don’t think so.

– Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO

What the pandemic showed is we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. So we’re not going to forget that lesson.

Scruples Studio won’t take out behavioural ads, include spy pixels in emails or use Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram for any part of their business.

A real alternative in search needs it’s own index and crawler, and autonomy over ranking.

In March 2019, following the terror attack at a mosque in Christchurch that was live-streamed on Facebook, Stuff felt the response from the platform was deeply unsatisfactory. Sinead and her colleagues stopped boosting their content because they did not want to support a company that had facilitated this happening. “That action had zero effect on our traffic.”

“It started with just a weekend off and it was such a breath of fresh air, so I decided to wait a week longer, and then figured why not add another week onto my break because honestly I was so much happier and more relaxed without it.”

The company found that ads served to users who opted out of cookies were bringing in as much or more money as ads served to users who opted in. The results were so strong that as of January 2020, NPO simply got rid of advertising cookies altogether.

“The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.”

All social movements have their innovators, early adopters, late adopters, early majority, and late majority. It’s up to each business to decide where on the adoption curve they could possible fit in. Or, of course, whether they’re fine funding Facebook’s continued operations with their patronage forever.

And found that for every £1 spent it received as little as 30p in revenue, meaning upto 70% is funnelled back to ad tech.