After years of conversations and more than a decade of other kinds of sports partnerships, the world’s most valuable public company finally began live streaming an actual game on Friday night, with two exclusive Major League Baseball contests.
And a bunch of ads. A BUNCH of ads.
That’s notable because Apple so far has seemed indifferent to the value of gathering user data for targeting advertising, especially on its ubiquitous iOS mobile platform but also with connected TVs. On iPhones and iPads, the company’s decision to stop allowing IDFA tags in its browser kneecapped Meta’s Facebook and Instagram among social-media companies that had relied on the data to extract far higher CPMs from ad clients.
And yes, Apple does receive a hefty check from Alphabet each year to make Google the default search engine on its platforms, giving Google access to the search data of hundreds of millions of Apple users.
But Apple has generally made its hostility to most advertising a key part of marketing, with strong language asserting that privacy is a human right.
So, Friday Night Baseball’s first games on Apple TV+ were subtly a big deal, setting all kinds of precedents. The first game, between the New York Mets and division rival Washington Nationals, was not only the first live-streamed sports event on Apple TV+, but it was also the first live event of any kind on the platform (other than slickly produced product announcements).
Ads studded the games themselves, the pre-game shows, the initial delay caused by stadium-lighting issues, and everything in between. It felt, with respect to advertising, like the kind of telecast you could have watched anytime over the past couple of decades, though with a more diverse broadcast booth and some nice interface wrinkles like better stats and crisp video.
Advertisers included The Usual Suspects: GEICO, Budweiser, the Marines, Subway, etc. And given that it’s 2022, a blockchain-technology company bought a series of ads…