is the iad the future of mobile advertising?
It seems almost certain that mobile phones will be the way that the majority of people access the internet in the very near future, it is already the case that in developing economies such as India using a mobile to access the internet is already the norm.
It is also the case that in Q4 2010 smart phones out sold PC’s for the first time (100 vs 92 million units since you asked) tablet sales will most likely hit 242 million units per annum by 2015 http://goo.gl/aQhBz
This got me thinking about how advertising will differ on mobile screens to that of the PC…
Currently performance of mobile adverts seems to be stronger, there is some debate on whether this is a function of the ratio of creative real estate to the screen size or indeed accidental clicks. Regardless it will be very interesting to see if CTR’s tail off in the same way that online display has done.
The general consensus is that innovative creative executions such as iAds will stave off such a fall in performance.
To the un-initiated above is the Nissan Leaf iAd which is the example that Apple used to highlight the functionality of the product at launch. To see it in action check this out: http://goo.gl/wW66S Apple designed iAds to “make people fall in love with advertising again”.
This all sounds great but there are still some concerns around iAds, primarily their cost, and despite slashing rate cards by circa 50% the cost of running a campaign in the UK is still around £325K.
Ad Mob (Owned by Google) seem like the outfit best placed to compete with Apple in this space and already offer some really great mobile solutions to compete with the iAD (at a fraction of the cost) including auto play interstitials like this one http://goo.gl/uaQhe
The big advantage I see for Ad Mob is that it can run across multiple networks and operating systems including Android which is the fastest growing mobile OS at the moment with 400K new handsets activated globally each day, conversely iAds can only run on iOS devices.
Apple touts one major advantage of the iAd as keeping the user in App rather than sending the user through to a browser upon engagement. I think as mobile browsing becomes the norm this will cease to be a huge competitive advantage.
Given the above and perhaps once the novelty wears off Apple will be forced to offer a more competitive pricing model, exactly like they have done with their other products…
