Apple WWDC24: C-side focuses on AI, B-side enters advertising measurement

Apple announced various updates to iOS 18 at WWDC24, including AI integration, desktop customization, control center enhancements, and privacy protection measures.

"Hey, Siri. What new did Apple announce at WWDC24 (Worldwide Developers Conference) on June 11 (Beijing time)?"

Siri: “Finally, there’s a calculator app on the iPad.”

Before this, such conversations would most likely only appear in various comedy programs, but after the release of iOS 18 in the future, it may really appear in reality. Although it sounds like an April Fool's joke, it does reveal to some extent the most important change in Apple at WWDC24 - Apple will integrate the redefined AI (Apple Intelligence) in iOS 18. It will most likely not change the world or make consumers unemployed, but will make the iPhone, iPad and Mac easier to use, and Siri smarter, and maybe even make some jokes with black humor.

At least, for Apple right now, AI is clearly the most important highlight of the entire WWDC24. In the first two-thirds of the event, Apple introduced a series of updates about iOS 18, which roughly include:

• Desktop: Customizable sorting and unified desktop color tone
• Control Center: More control options can be added
• Lock screen: Flashlight and camera can be replaced with other functions
• Privacy: Launch of "App Lock"
• iMessage: font style, emoji customization options added, can be set to send later
• Mail: Automatically sort and categorize
• Maps: New terrain maps
• Wallet: tap to cash function, two new Apple Pay payment methods
• Notes: Search function to find content from past notes
• Game Mode: Coming soon to iPhone
• Photos: Introducing the smart feature "Collection" to make photo classification and search more accurate

In the 40 minutes after the content was finished, Apple took great pains to introduce Apple Intelligence. Obviously, for Apple, combining AI and smart devices is an extremely important strategic direction.

01

Focusing on AI, Cook remains cautious.

But it is worth noting that Apple seems to be intentionally or unintentionally avoiding cooperation with OpenAI. It only spent 2 minutes mentioning the cooperation between the two parties during the entire press conference. Even though OpenAI's CEO Altman was sitting in the audience, he was not invited to give a speech on stage.

Back to the AI ​​part, Apple's entire press conference lasted 1 hour and 45 minutes, of which 40 minutes were used to discuss how AI will change the experience of all Apple's smart devices, and this change basically revolves around two dimensions.

The first is the parts that make the device smarter. For example, the user's device will automatically prioritize notifications according to the settings, and put the imminent deadline or afternoon flight information at the top of the notification display to make the user pay more attention to it. Or it can automatically summarize and display the topic summary of long texts, so that people can grasp the key information in a shorter time, and can intelligently generate some pictures and texts when sending messages to friends, making the communication process more interesting. These are the main functions of generative AI that most consumers are quite familiar with.

In addition to these application modes that are already familiar to many ChatGPT users, the most important update of Apple AI is the linkage and connection across apps. Apple AI can coordinate almost all apps and retrieve data from almost all apps. Furthermore, Apple AI can also analyze key data in applications based on user usage scenarios, refer to what applications users are currently using, and provide targeted solutions.

At WWDC24, Apple gave a case study: suppose one of my meetings was rescheduled to later in the afternoon, and I wanted to know if this would affect my ability to attend my daughter's performance on time. Apple's smart app can pull in data from other apps, know exactly who my daughter is, determine the time and location of the performance based on the invitation she sent, combine the meeting time, and the time it takes to get from the office to the theater, and finally come up with a conclusion.

Simply put, Apple can integrate data from different applications and understand the logic behind the combination of these data. However, considering the relationship between AI and cloud processors, this will raise another concern, that is, if all this data is stored in the cloud, will it cause privacy and security issues.

Apple also gave a corresponding solution, that is, if it is just dealing with some basic problems, A17 Pro and Apple M series chips will provide the computing power foundation for Apple intelligence. That is to say, when a user makes a request, Apple will give priority to trying to process the request through the device itself.

Only when more computing power is needed will Apple try to send data to the cloud for processing through cloud computing, and it will only send data related to the task request and will not store related data in the cloud.

At present, it is uncertain whether consumers can accept and recognize Apple's privacy protection plan, but the media and Musk are obviously skeptical about it. For example, the BBC pointed out that for many years, Apple refused to allow its users to download any applications outside the App Store on the grounds that these applications may not be safe. Now, Apple is going to cooperate with external companies.

Unlike the relatively implicit remarks of the BBC, after the press conference, Musk directly mocked Apple on X, saying that Apple's move was essentially selling user data to OpenAI.

Even in the next few hours, some pictures were posted specifically to satirize this collaboration.

Perhaps this is why the cooperation with OpenAI has indeed greatly promoted Apple's competitive potential in the field of AI, and made terminal devices and Siri smarter. However, when WWDC24 was officially held, Cook was still particularly cautious about mentioning the cooperation between Apple and OpenAI. Even the video recorded by Ultraman before the event was not presented on the spot (although before WWDC24, the cooperation between Apple and OpenAI had already become one of the centers of discussion on the Internet).

Obviously, Apple does not want to face the whirlpool of claiming that it is protecting user privacy data through various means on the one hand, and needing to prove that it has not sold user data to OpenAI on the other hand.

02

Apple is quietly replacing SKAdNetwork and PCM with a new advertising and attribution framework.

After all, before WWDC, if the cooperation with OpenAI enabled C-end users to achieve higher efficiency, then the "Web Eraser Tool" described as a powerful ad blocker built into Safari was a blow to all B-end companies.

Even many foreign media called this tool a new tool that makes almost all web publishers shudder. Therefore, before the start of WWDC, many practitioners were worried whether this feature would be announced and implemented at WWDC, just like the previous ATT framework, Private Relay and Privacy Manifests.

Judging from the results, Apple seems to have abandoned the "Web Eraser" tool that was only visible in the developer version of Safari in iOS 18, but at X, many marketing industry practitioners believe that the series of new features announced by Apple, especially the autonomous adjustment of the order of app notifications and privacy cloud computing, represent that Apple is trying to further manipulate how media-generated content is displayed in front of consumers, and to isolate user data from advertising technology groups (whether advertisers or brand owners).

In addition to these, Apple also released a developer document called "AdAttributionKit", which shows that this is a new framework that houses all of Apple's privacy-centric advertising attribution technologies.

A brief description of AdAttributionKit's working logic

According to the documents, Apple used to have two app advertising attribution frameworks for privacy protection, including the famous SKAdNetwork and PCM (Private Click Measurement) for the web. Now Apple is gradually phasing out these product names and calling them App AdAttributionKit and Web AdAttributionKit, and classifying them under the AdAttribution Kit framework.

The reason why it is called the name of an obsolete product rather than an obsolete product is that according to the document information, no matter which AdAttributionKit it is, its essence is to give the basic functions of traditional SKAdNetwork and PCM, and in terms of their working methods, neither of them has changed much. The only new content is that Apple plans to introduce a long-term support (LTS) policy for re-engagement campaigns .

Simply put, starting from iOS 18, App AdAttributionKit feedback will include interactive information for click-through rate attribution, so that advertisers can see how long it takes for users to open the app after downloading the software, thereby measuring the ROI of specific campaigns . In addition, Apple clearly pointed out in the new document that AdAttributionKit should not be used in conjunction with fingerprint recognition, and does not allow developers to "obtain data from the device and then attribute it to a unique identifier." At the same time, a technical meeting called "Understanding AdAttributionKit" will be opened specifically for developers at WWDC.

Introduction to App AdAttributionKit

In general, this series of new frameworks is essentially integrating terminology, integrating PCM and SkAdNetwork (SKAN), which seemed unrelated in the past but are actually very similar in nature, into one specification, allowing companies to quickly determine the purpose of the framework. Of course, it may also be because SKAdNetwork is still too complicated as a whole, and Apple is not only unable to prevent measurement vendors from continuing to use IP addresses as the only ID for user identification, but also unable to make all applications widely adopt it.

Although simply changing the name cannot solve these stubborn problems at present, it at least shows that Apple will go further and spend more time to change the defects of the current advertising measurement technology.

By Innocent Roland

Source: Morketing