Strategy question
what are the advertising challenges to overcome in 2021?
- Rakuten
- Strategy
- Easy
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What this question tests
Awareness of industry-level strategic shifts in 2021 and how a specific company should respond, grounded in real events.
How to approach it
- Ground the answer in what actually happened in 2021: Apple's iOS 14.5 ATT rollout curbing third-party tracking, plus rising cookie-deprecation pressure.
- Note the resulting challenge: performance advertisers lost granular attribution, hurting measured ROI.
- Note privacy regulation pressure pushing advertisers toward first-party data.
- Connect this to a company like Rakuten, whose affiliate and cashback data is a first-party asset and potential moat.
- Propose investing in first-party data collection and aggregated or probabilistic measurement instead of individual-level tracking.
- Note the guardrail: any first-party strategy still needs explicit user consent to stay compliant.
What a strong answer includes
- Cites the real, dated 2021 events, ATT and cookie deprecation, instead of a vague 'privacy is a challenge.'
- Connects the challenge specifically to Rakuten's business model, its own first-party shopping data as a durable asset.
- Notes the trade-off: first-party strategies take time to build and don't fully replace lost granularity.
Common mistakes
- Giving a generic, non-2021-specific answer like 'ads need to be more relevant.'
- Not connecting the answer back to the company being asked about.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you help a smaller retailer without much first-party data?
- What metric would replace individual-level attribution?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop