BUSI 701 (2-1) DISCUSSION

Discussion Thread – Marketing Author’s Name The Institutional Affiliation Course Number and Name Instructor Name Assignment Due Date Subtopic Selected - 1.2. Effects on Ability to Generate Value from Advertising Marketing Science Institute (MSI) notes the shift will be fundamental as third-party cookies have been increasingly degraded or constrained, and platform policies like Apple App Tracking Transparency (ATT) have prevented cross-site identifiers, allowing precision targeting, and advertiser willingness to pay. The agenda poses the following questions: How can firms gain maximum advertising value through search data, data fusion, and the aggregate Marketing Mix Model (MMM) in a cookie-less world? How can policy design avoid infringing on privacy and maintain the value of information? Current State of Research Focusing on the data challenges in the business related to information collection, privacy control has a dramatic impact on the value of targeted ads. Wernerfelt et al. (2025) measure the utility of off-site tracking data to ad delivery; by comparing outcomes with and without such data, they demonstrate that tracking information increases effectiveness in ways advertisers value and spend money on; this implies a loss of advertiser-side surplus in the removal of cross-site identifiers. Adding to this, Dubé et al. (2025) provide a synthesis of intended and unintended results of privacy regulation, pointing out that policies such as ATT can worsen the performance of online advertising, can re-zone rent among ad tech stack actors, and may produce consumer and firm heterogeneous welfare trade-offs. Besides, opt-in/opt-out frictions rebalance the audience mix to impede targeting. Choi, Jerath, and Sarvary (2023) emphasized a consent game analysis when a consent requirement accompanies data access; a significant portion of users refuse, reducing high-signal coverage and increasing unmarketable impressions, resulting in efficiency and surplus losses. It is one reason why post-ATT and consent-intensive contexts have lower conversion lift and noisier attribution. Furthermore, platform-level policies experience competitive and market-structure impacts beyond the ad Return on Investment (ROI). Li and Tsai (2022) used tracking restrictions in iOS to demonstrate changes in competition in mobile app markets, the use of competitive fragility against incumbent monetization models, acquisition channels, and the first-party data advantage that larger incumbents can enjoy. These effects on market structure reverberate back to the value of adve...