Meta To Offer Less Personalised Ads & How It Affects You

Phil Ditchfield November 27, 2024

With fines constantly taking their toll on Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media platform plans to offer less personalised ads to appease EU regulators. In this blog, we talk about the new update, Meta’s plan to help targeting, and Red Cow Media’s thoughts on the recent update.

November Update

For years, Meta has been breaching several EU regulations and facing fines, including in November 2024, Antitrust ($846 million), and Privacy Laws breach in 2023 ($1.3 billion). Whilst this was a record-breaking fine in the EU, Meta reported revenue of $134 billion in 2023, so it’s not a major concern for the social titan.

What is a concern is that after the IOS 14 update, Facebook had to limit access to data depending on a user’s acceptance of tracking, which led to limited personalised ads and report performance. A lot of businesses saw revenue and data drop massively as Facebook may have been responsible for a user but wasn’t legally allowed to report on it. This new change will create further difficulty for advertisers all around the UK and Europe.

Meta’s Thoughts

Meta has said that the EU regulations go “beyond what is required in the law” but has conceded and will pay the fine. Meta has also added that they generate $100 billion+ from advertising each year, but this won’t be the case if their advertising algorithm is made less effective.

“We remain committed to personalised advertising, which will always be the cornerstone of a free and inclusive internet.” Meta spokesperson

Context Ads

The California tech giant has offered some additional information and over the coming weeks will offer people using the app for free the option for “contextual ads” which will be based on age, gender and location. 

It’s fairly natural for users to click decline when being asked if they want to be tracked, but this just means that the ads they see may not be as relevant to them, a little like television advertising. 

Red Cow Media’s thoughts: 

While this change will make it much more difficult to advertise, the IOS 14 update was one of the biggest marketing changes that we’ve been able to overcome. By partnering with businesses to help improve data feeds, we’ve been able to help businesses grow. 

It tends to be growing brands with specific audiences that now struggle with meta advertising; ad niches are identified, and brands want to target their potential customers, but with this new update, it’s going to make it even more challenging for small/medium businesses to grow. Meta’s Advantage+ audiences use machine learning to target the right users, but it needs data to run well, and small budgets aren’t as effective for this.

If you’d like more information about the update or just want to chat about your advertising, feel free to give us a call at 01617110888, or you can email phil@redcowmedia.co.uk.