There are many reasons for the dire situation at Meta Platforms Inc. The company, which has lost two-thirds of its market value this year and cut 11,000 jobs on Nov. 9, has been battered by damaging news about the political and social impact of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Investors are skeptical of Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to pivot from social networking to the metaverse and worried about rising rivals such as ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok. And that’s to say nothing of the stresses on the broader economy and the digital advertising market.
But one factor looms above the rest: the changes to Apple Inc.’s privacy policies that have shaken the foundations of the targeted advertising industry. “Meta and lots of other tech companies are hiding underneath this big, gray cloud that’s covering the economy as a whole and sort of using that as a way to hide the reality that Apple is probably doing the most damage and is putting the tightest squeeze on businesses at the moment,” says Max Willens, a senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Inc. Meta’s ability to recover rests largely on finding ways to operate in this new environment.
Zuckerberg’s pitch to advertisers has long been that his company can guarantee that their marketing will reach the right users at Facebook and Instagram. Meta has used the data it collects about its users to help marketers pinpoint those with specific characteristics—for instance, identifying people who resembled their existing customers in key ways—and sell them specific products.
But last year, Apple changed its privacy policies in a way that significantly limited ad targeting on iOS devices, allowing users to decide whether to allow advertisers to track them. This made advertising with Meta more expensive, because less accurate marketers had to spend more money showing ads to the wrong type of person. Apple also prevented digital advertisers from accessing data needed to measure the outcomes of an ad after users clicked on it, making it more difficult to shift spending toward the most effective ads. In February, Meta estimated the changes would drag down revenue by $10 billion this year, or about 9% of what it’s expected to bring in.
Apple has continued to make changes to its policies, taking additional cuts to money that flows through iPhones, such as on in-app purchases that users and advertisers make on social apps to boost their content to larger audiences. In October a Meta spokesperson accused Apple, which is building its own advertising business, of “undercutting others in the digital economy.” Apple has maintained that its goal has simply been to protect privacy. A Meta spokesperson didn’t respond to interview requests.
These changes have been a drag on the entire digital advertising industry, but they’ve hit Meta particularly hard. The company’s revenue in the third quarter totaled $27.7 billion, 4.5% lower than the same quarter in 2021. By contrast, Google parent company Alphabet’s revenue rose 6%, and revenue at smaller competitors Snap and Pinterest both increased more than 5%. Meta’s and Alphabet Inc.’s share of digital ad spending in the US is expected to fall below 50% next year for the first time since at least 2019, according to Insider Intelligence.
There’s still plenty of money flowing into digital ads. Spending from the largest brands rose 5% in the third quarter from the same period a year ago, accounting for two-thirds of all media buys, according to Standard Media Index. But that growth was slower than that of out-of-home venues such as billboards, subways and buses, which increased 14% from a year earlier, and newspapers, which grew 22%.
Advertisers feel as if there are more viable alternatives to Meta than there have been in the recent past, Willens says. “It’s giving marketers more license to lower their spending,” he adds. “Meta is going to have to recalibrate after the major go-go times of 2021 disappeared.”
The company has no experience managing decline. In the past, managers have been allowed to hire employees before annual budgets were approved in the spring, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because the process was private. This year, managers were instead asked to identify their bottom performers, two of the people say, a precursor to November’s job cuts. Employees have historically been able to work on passion projects, even if those projects weren’t always aligned with money-making opportunities for the business, say the people. That’s increasingly off the table, too.
An obvious explanation for Zuckerberg’s interest in the metaverse is that Apple wouldn’t wield so much power in a virtual universe where Meta controls the hardware and operating system. In the meantime, as he told employees in a message on Nov. 9, he thinks that Meta will have to be “leaner and more efficient.” He’s directing the company’s focus on artificial intelligence tools to help it compete with TikTok while also relying on Meta’s massive ad platform to fund his longer-term vision.
To do that, Meta is reworking its own targeting technology, using AI to determine which users should see which ads. Meta is operating two “centers of excellence for AI,” one in service of the ad business and the other focused on the user experience for Facebook and Instagram, said Tom Alison, the head of the Facebook app at Meta in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek before the job cuts were announced. The company has also worked to improve its ad performance tracking, which is especially important in video, because both Facebook and Instagram have prioritized a popular new short-form video format on their platforms called Reels.
A year after Apple’s changes, it appears as if some of Meta’s adjustments are working. In September marketing researcher Appsumer published a study on spending for more than 100 consumer apps across Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North America. The share of advertising budgets going to Meta stabilized in the first and second quarters. It’s now about 28%, according to Appsumer, after having fallen to 24%, from 32%, in the first six months after Apple’s measures took effect.
Users are watching about 140 billion videos across Meta’s platforms each day. But Reels doesn’t make as much money as its other products, costing Meta revenue as its audience shifts its time there. That alone cost Meta $500 million last quarter, and it will continue to be a drag for 12 months to 18 months, Zuckerberg said on the company’s earnings call in October.
Meta has also been developing ads that direct Facebook and Instagram users to Messenger or WhatsApp to open a chat with the advertiser. Zuckerberg called this the company’s fastest-growing ad product and said it’s currently bringing in revenue at a projected annual rate of $9 billion.
Even before the job cuts, the company had already been making some changes to bring its “best people” together to work on key problems such as the AI-driven content recommendation technology, Alison said. “When we make advances in the organic product, we can then figure out what we can carry over into the ads world, as well,” he says.
All this is shaping up to be a major challenge for Meta, at a period of unprecedented stress on the company. For the first time in its history, it’s going to have to learn to do more with less. —With Gerry Smith
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
