The tool that Apple quietly rolled out just last month, Apple Business Connect, resets the digital advertising chess board, even if it’s not top of mind with most digital ad executives.

Whether you are a CMO marketing a nationwide chain with multiple outlets or a standalone small business hoping to increase your visibility and sales, you’ll have to think about integrating this new, or rather renewed, tool. Ostensibly, its messaging whispers, is there to “help people find your small business across Apple.” But it’s as much aimed at national big businesses as it is as any small ones.

Just as Apple over the last few years has made its walled garden more impermeable than ever, as it increased its ability to segregate data only it could collect, it has built a dataset that is unsurpassed by that of any other company in the world.

This newest phase of skirting other search platforms and cozying up to nationwide and small businesses, brick-and-mortar ones that want to be featured with more differentiation in its Maps, shifts the advertising business ever more toward an Apple-dependent digital services model, turning the attention of marketers and agencies away from one based on an open web of journalism articles or social media posts. It’s about embedding “ads” or business and service placements in maps and other apps where consumers are actively looking for information as they navigate through their commute, their local travel, their vacations or their international journeys. This move is part of the revolution I have written about that goes from “traditional” search to the new forms of consumer digital discovery.

Apple Business Connect lets businesses create and update their information in the cards that represent them in apps and services that only Apple controls, like Apple Maps, Wallet, Messages, and in search results via Siri or Spotlight. Updates business owners make to their cards will then propagate to all these places. That incredible access to the right place at the right time for 1.8 billion active Apple devices has never been available before.

As the agency media world has splintered “creative” into an ever-greater focus on a service-location model, Apple Business Connect API is adapted well to this new world, where current information on maps and apps at scale is central to the game of capturing consumers, especially “for businesses with many locations, Business Connect includes Business Connect API to easily deliver accurate, up-to-date information to Maps at scale through listing management agencies such as Reputation, Rio SEO, SOCi, Uberall, and Yext.” It also automates integrations with Instacart, Booking.com, OpenTable and more.

Consumers are making choices and engaging in discovery differently, and as digital service content has emerged as a way to replace simple search, maps and apps are the path people take to discovery (instead of starting with a search tool first). As The New York Times points out, “While Google remains the world’s dominant search engine, people are turning to Amazon to search for products, Instagram to stay updated on trends and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses.” And now they can get even more of it all right in their iPhone and Mac’s native OS.

It’s yet another way Apple is quietly and effectively flexing its muscles with its data and hardware to compete against Facebook, which has been a de facto storefront for millions of small businesses for years, and with the open web approach of Google Search and Google Maps — except that now it’s being offered by Apple which owns the phones and computers and operating systems that 1.8 billion people use instead.

And that gives us a glimpse of what the endgame might be.

Apple doesn’t talk much about ads and provides very little disclosure about what its plans are for them. But while Apple has been making some of the most valuable and affluent online audiences untrackable by other parties, the global giant has also been at work quietly building a massive advertising business of its own.

Think this is hyperbole? Consider that Apple plans to double its digital ad workforce with job ads that promise its goals are nothing less than “redefining advertising” for a “privacy-centric” world.

Apple's ads business has thrived after the company's much-discussed iOS privacy update last year undercut the user-tracking efforts of app developers. But not that of Apple’s own apps of course. In 2021 Apple generated $3.7 billion with its global advertising business. Last quarter, Apple said it made $19.6 billion from services like advertising, the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, Apple News, Apple TV+ and Apple Pay —representing nearly 25% of its quarterly revenue.

Apple seems to be growing its ad business at a clip that could make it the company’s next $30 billion business by 2026. (Yes, it’s still lower than the $30 billion in advertising revenue Amazon generates now and far beneath the $200 billion delivered by Google but it’s coming up fast if quietly.) And unlike hardware, advertising is a high-margin revenue stream for services the company already owns and supports, especially when it's able to write the rules for how its targeting data can and can’t be used.

All these power plays add up for Apple’s captive audience.

If a smart marketer makes a deal to buy Apple ad space in apps and services, she will get more data about user behavior and she will get her business in front of iPhone users with high intent to take action. In fact, she can see what consumers were doing when they found her ad, which version of her ads users saw and which keywords ads appeared on — in real time.

If the same marketer bought ads through a third-party platform and targeted consumers who have opted out of tracking, she would have to wait three days for insights on her campaigns and then receive only aggregate information. Queue the sad trombone. And the trumpet reveille for buying ads from Apple.

Your move, marketers.