Facebook's New PR Campaign Promotes Personalized Advertising Ahead of Apple's App Tracking Transparency Launch

Facebook is launching a new PR campaign that highlights how small businesses rely on personalized advertising to help their businesses grow from "an idea into a livelihood." The new campaign indirectly takes aim at App Tracking Transparency (ATT), an upcoming iOS 14 feature that will require apps to ask for a user's permission to opt into tracking for personalized advertising.

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The new campaign, called "Good Ideas Deserve To Be Found," launched today and will run for a total of 12 weeks across Facebook and appear in TV spots across the United States in cooperation with agency Droga5, according to CNBC. The video says that small businesses lack the tools to grow without the help of Facebook's personalized advertising, and that the ads help people find what they love and what they think is "cool."

Alongside the new campaign, Facebook is also rolling out a series of changes on the platform itself. Facebook says it will simplify its Ads Manager to make it easier for small businesses to utilize personalized marketing plans with an improved dashboard that can make viewing a campaign's performance easier, and allow for faster optimizations.

Facebook will also waive fees for small businesses using its Checkout on Shops feature through June 2021, and will keep in place its previously announced waiver of fees for paid online events until at least August of the year.

In the past few months, Facebook has ramped up its anti-Apple rhetoric and voiced strong disapproval for ATT. Facebook says it's concerned that once the change launches, it will severely impact small businesses that rely on personalized advertising. Facebook and others believe that the majority of users will opt out of tracking, make it significantly harder to show users personalized ads.

Earlier this month, Facebook released the prompt that it plans to show users once iOS and iPadOS 14.5 ships in the early spring. In the pop-up prompt, Facebook is asking users to consent to tracking in order to receive a "better ads experience." Facebook says that even if users don't consent to the tracking, they'll still receive ads, but that they'll be "less relevant."

Facebook is reportedly preparing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the Cupertino tech giant of anticompetitive behavior with App Tracking Transparency, amongst other features such as iMessage.