🚨 Breaking 🚨 Scoop - @Activision tells all employees it has fired 20 people, reprimanded 20 more and will triple investments into training resources as it tries to clean up culture following allegations of pervasive sexual misconduct, gender pay disparity and more.
*Thread*
Frances Townsend, compliance chief, tells @FT:
“It doesn’t matter what your rank is, what your job is. If you’ve committed some sort of misconduct or you’re a leader who has tolerated a culture that is not consistent with our values, we’re going to take action."
Back in August, hundreds of Activision Blizzard workers walked out in protest after management dismissed a California state lawsuit describing a “pervasive ‘frat boy’ workplace culture” as “irresponsible” and “inaccurate”.
Townsend acknowledged the company hasn't met all employee demands but said further changes are coming. “Kotick (the CEO) and the Board basically gave me a blank cheque,” she said.
First Snap question is about Apple.... Wants to know if it'll take a quarter, multiple quarters or years to set a new-normal:
"This has definitely been a frustrating setback for us," @evanspiegel says.
1/?
"With these new Apple changes, those tools were essentially rendered blind," @evanspiegel says. "You can only really measure your advertising results using the success parameters that Apple's already defined. The reporting is delayed for a significant period of time ...
and (it's) often unavailable if you don't hit a certain threshold of conversion. Very hard to see performance on a creative level...
So what we've done is built our own solution called Advanced Conversions that allows people to do much more sophisticated things.
*Breaking* @Snap blames @Apple privacy changes for Q3 earnings miss and says Q4 revenues will come in between $1.16bn and $1.2bn, versus consensus estimate of $1.4bn.
*a Thread*
Chief executive Evan Spiegel says: "the new Apple-provided measurement solution did not scale as we had expected, making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS."
Snap chief of business Jeremi Gorman dismissed Apple's tool (SKAdNetwork), calling it "unreliable as a standalone measurement solution." He said measurements "diverge meaningfully from the results we observed on (other measurement solutions)."
@Apple’s advertising business has more than tripled its market share in the six months after it introduced privacy changes to iPhones that obstructed rivals, including @Facebook and @Google, from targeting ads at consumers.
*A Thread*
Search Ads now drives 58% of all iOS app installations that can be tied back to paid ads, according to @Branch, whose basket of data comprises 250 major apps including BuzzFeed, Instacart, Strava and Starbucks. That’s more than three times its 17% share a year ago
What has made Search Ads suddenly attractive is not any new feature but the fact that Apple has rendered the rest of the ad industry “blind” in the iOS universe, says @kochavaofficial, whose own data has Search Ads up 69% since June, while rivals are down 43%(!) on average.
Obtained documents from Tencent explaining how CAID and QAID work. The reason for its own IDFA solution, per someone familiar, is WeChat is big enough to do this on its own -- 1.2bn users. It doesn't need the China Ad Association.
It's taken me a while to understand this but @Facebook is unlikely to be hurt by Apple's move. Yes, they need to rebuild their ad infrastructure b/c attribution becomes difficult, but 1st-party data now becomes paramount. Facebook has 2.7bn users. They will thrive.
Sen Klobuchar said @Apple and @Google “operate at gatekeepers, with the power to decide how or whether apps can reach iPhone and Android users.”
“Just because a company creates a successful innovative business that consumers like doesn't give it a free pass to harm competition or ignore our antitrust laws.”
“In 2020, consumers are estimated to have spent $72.3bn in Apple's App Store and $38.6bn in Google's Play Store. Applying their standard commission rates to these amounts net Apple and Google billions of dollars.”