Tech behemoth Apple has announced that they are planning to double their burgeoning digital advertising business workforce. The news comes within 18 months of introducing sweeping privacy changes that have made life their larger rivals chaotic, in the lucrative industry. 

According to Linkedin, Apple’s advertising platform team has about 250 people and its careers site is considering hiring 216 people.

The digital advertising industry has become more and more lucrative for companies as they get a chance to do tons of marketing and promotion by engaging customers. In 2018, CEO Tim Cook said, “If you monetise your customers, you’ll make a ton of money.”

Yet, the digital advertising industry has been criticised for Apple’s advertising since Apple announced last year’s privacy rules that overturned the $400 billion digital advertising market and made it difficult for advertising to align with Apple’s $1 billion+.  Since the new privacy policy, Facebook’s parent companies Meta, Snap and Twitter have lost billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, Apple’s advertising business has been generating quite a moolah. Revenue from the business has grown from just a few hundred million dollars in the late 2010s to about $5 billion this year. According to research group Evercore ISI, the company expects Apple to have its $30 billion advertising business within four years.

Apple’s endeavour to hire new talent for digital business is telling as the company’s job ads talk about their goal being nothing less than “redefining advertising” for a “privacy-centric” world.

The company would be filling 216 jobs which include product designers and managers, data engineers, and sales specialists.

An ad for engineering leaders posted on August 24th referred to “Apple’s most sensitive strategic plan” and called it “the most privacy-preserving and technologically sophisticated . platform and demand-side platform”.

All are in not favour of the way Apple is going about it. David Steinberg, Chief Executive of Marketing Technology firm Zeta Global, told the Singapore times that Apple is trying to be “Machiavellian” and “excellent” by adopting privacy rules that force its competitors to rebuild their advertising infrastructure; and at the same time provide an opportunity for the company to fill the void.

“Building a system to effectively compete with incumbents with tens of thousands of employees and 10 to 20 years of maturity is usually an impossible task. Unless you were able to put your competitors at a disadvantage in some way on your platform,” he added.

Positions are primarily in the United States but include at least 27 positions in Europe, China [12], India [12], Japan[4] and Singapore[2].