Yesterday’s Apple event had the Internet community buzzing about the new iPhone 4.0 OS, and impressive stats regarding the iPad. But perhaps the most important announcement made by Steve Jobs was the launch of iAd, Apple’s newest venture in mobile. Dubbed “mobile ads with emotion” by Jobs, iAd will be integrated with the upgraded iPhone OS expected to be released in the coming months. iAd will not only help keep the cost of apps down, it will change the face and direction of mobile advertising.
Even though Apple has limited experience in mobile advertising, its approach to finding a creative solution to keep developers and consumers happy is something that even established mobile ad companies have been challenged to do thus far. From Jobs’ description of the service, ads will run within apps, eliminating the need for a separate browser window. The ads themselves will be interactive and graphically stimulating, running like apps themselves. At yesterday’s event, Jobs showed an example of an iAd promoting Toy Story 3; the add allowed click throughs to view information about the movie, watch the trailer, and even buy products – all through the ad itself.
Apple’s expertise in producing sleek, creative and visually interesting products and content is where iAd has an edge over its competition, Google being its biggest competitor. While Google and Apple are both innovative and smart companies, their approaches to advertising are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Google has built itself on ads within search, which is perfect for a typical browsing experience, but they are still figuring out how to incorporate ads into their mobile apps and browsers. As Jobs pointed out yesterday, “On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop. They’re [users] spending all their time on these apps, they’re using apps to get to data on the Internet, not generalized search.” Though they are equipped with search and browsing capabilities, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch are geared toward entertainment and visuals rather than a static browsing experience. Perhaps having the opportunity to create an experience rather than a typical ad will entice advertisers to utilize iAd over everyone else, despite a potentially higher cost.
For all of iAd’s strengths, there are of course some weaknesses as well. Ads are fine in moderation, but what Jobs has described also seems like these ads will interrupt the app experience. “If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that’d be 10 ads per device per day‚ about the same as a TV show,” he said yesterday. If an ad pops up while users are playing games, watching movies, or listening to music – how effective will they really be? Users may opt to pay for an app rather than have a free version subsidized by advertising to avoid this frequent ad interruption.
iAd will no doubt keep Google and Apple head-to-head in mobile advertising. While Google focuses on how to personalize and monetize their mobile ads, Apple is focusing on making ads more effective by creating an entire user experience, in its true fashion. Both have wide audiences and popular, effective platforms to utilize. With the mobile ad market predicted to reach $3.3 billion by 2013, there is a lot at stake to see who will become the true leader in mobile advertising.
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