Thanks for bearing with me for taking last week off. No one told me that being a content machine would require so much content. There are people that do this everyday. I cannot.
An Apple A Day
Hey, did you guys hear something about Apple building a DSP?
Apple has had mixed results with endeavors like this, haven’t they? I laughed when Apple announced Apple TV+ and that their first, *game-changing* piece of content would be something called “Planet of the Apps,” which is simultaneously an excellent pun and a terrible idea for a reality show. Ultimately though, the investment and eye for content caught up and they’re busy producing some of the best stuff out there.* On the other hand, Apple News just doesn’t do it for me as a news aggregator. It either doesn’t know me or doesn’t care to know me, but whatever it’s curating for me stinks. It’s a fractional (and not a large fraction by any stretch) of the traffic that comes through to major content providers. And according to this, I’m not the only one who thinks so.
*Right now, Severance
However, and I was speaking about this with someone just yesterday, if this is an indication that Apple is building tech to mediate and get smarter/more efficient/more informed about how it spreads demand across its spate of supply (presumably including Apple TV+) and leverage its mountains of 1st party data, then why not? I’m not suggesting it would be super easy to build such tech, but they essentially just need to build a bidder and then light surrounding tech (like a rudimentary UI) to plug in the demand. That doesn’t seem like a huge lift or too distracting to Apple’s general mission.
But a couple of things:
I get that Apple prefers to build over buy (and it’s hard to argue the results there generally speaking), but if Netflix looked at the field and decided it would make more sense to partner with someone than build the tech themselves, I think that speaks volumes. Even if you went out and white labeled something (which I’m sure any company would be happy to do to score the Apple business/volume), you’d probably be way ahead in the end and have plenty of control over the roadmap. Or, and I know this sounds farfetched but bear with me, go buy one of them (or make a strategic investment with a path to purchase)
If they’re thinking in the Apple ecosystem, again, probably not too hard. If the idea here is to move outside of the Apple ecosystem and take over the DSP landscape with mind-blowing functionality that will shift the landscape in meaningful and important ways, then well I’m not so sure. That’s a much taller task*, requiring a ton of investment in an area where the leaders in the space have a decade-long head start. I’m not sure Apple knows what it doesn’t know here.
*Still working on my understatements
If you’re interested in reading more, this is a nice roundup of smart people talking about whether they think an Apple DSP can be successful (SPOILER ALERT: they do). I think iAd is an interesting, but probably not terribly relevant comparison. First of all, it’s been almost a decade since that was fired up and the landscape (and Apple’s role as a content owner) has changed pretty materially. But more importantly, Apple is a significantly larger company. Its market cap in at the end of 2013 was $500B. As of yesterday, it’s $2.6T - 5x. There’s more resources available to make this succeed. Money isn’t everything of course, but it don’t hurt.
That’s The Way The Cookie Crumbles, Part Deux
In another announcement that blew the minds of nearly no one, Google announced last week that it will delay the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome “until the second half of 2024.”
Can we just agree this is probably not going to happen, regardless of how good or bad it might or may be for the industry (and/or Google themselves), or are we still holding to this fantasy? This is starting to feel like the promise I made to start clearing out the storage unit that I lost the key to six years ago.*
*I *will* clean that storage unit out
Rest In Power
Boy, we lost a couple of icons last weekend, didn’t we?
You know, I’m not a Celtics* apologist and I’d never claim to be one because that would be admitting something about myself and Boston that I really don’t think I have the energy to confront. But you look at a guy like Bill Russell - a guy who won at every level in every position that he was asked to undertake at the time he did it with the pressure of having to be Bill freaking Russell every time he stepped anywhere in the country AND to be (by all accounts) a fantastic, generous guy who relentlessly pushed for equal rights for all - and you think about who you want to be as a person and how you want to be remembered.
*I’d rather root for a New York-based basketball team that sits in endless 5-year rebuilding cycles that restart every other year at best
My favorite episode of Star Trek is the one where they go back in time to the 1930’s to find McCoy after he altered the timeline and changed the future in such a way that everything they know has disappeared, including the Starship Enterprise. This episode either doesn’t (or barely, it’s hard to keep all of this stuff in my brain) feature Lt. Uhura, but she was a powerful, ever present force on the show. Nichelle Nichols wasn’t the first Black woman to appear on television, but she was the first Black woman to appear in a position of power on television (she’s was fourth-in-command on the Enterprise) and that’s a meaningful distinction.
I think Emerson said “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
With Up So Floating Many Bells Down
It was my wife’s birthday last Monday and for her gift, she asked that everyone pick their favorite poem and read it to her*. I don’t know that I have a favorite poem, per se, but one that’s stuck with me since high school is an e.e. cummings poem called “Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town.” If you have a moment, give it a read and let me know what you think in the comments (or LinkedIn or text me or whatever)
*This probably makes us sound very cultured, but we also finished watching season one of FBoy Island that same day on HBOMax, so you know, everything’s relative
Thanks for reading, as always. Same time next week.
The City On The Edge of Forever; she was on the away team but didn't jump through the portal, she stayed behind with McCoy and the redshirts.