Digithoughts

Generally speaking, human beings hate ads. After years and years of using online and mobile ad-supported applications, we've trained ourselves to ignore most advertisements. We simply don't permit our eyes to wander to the lower right rail with the embedded Flash ad animating wildly for our attention. We habitually track our eyes from the Web site's navigation bar directly past the rectangular banner ad below it and on to the desirable content in the center of the page. On a mobile device, we avoid ads because they are disruptive and pose a mild threat of data loss. When we click an ad, we're yanked out of the running application and taken to a Web site on the mobile phone's browser. If you were doing something within the app before clicking the ad, there is a chance that you will have to do it over. It's no wonder that human beings hate ads.

With the introduction of Apple's new iAd platform last Thursday, we may soon bear witness to an evolution of mobile advertising as the stigmata of advertising is slowly repaired. Steve Jobs explained that iAd improves upon the interactivity of digital ads and adds the emotion that traditional ads carry. iAd allows advertisers to create rich, interactive, mini-campaigns that resemble the many brand-specific apps you often find in the App Store, i.e., Gucci. The iAd campaigns that were demoed played audio and video, enabled commerce both inside and outside the App Store, reacted to touch gestures and shaking, and allowed users to download free branded content like wallpaper to their iPhone. These are features that are impossible to include in typical banner ads today, like those served from AdMob, and currently only exist in brand-specific iPhone applications within the App Store. With iAd, the interactivity of your advertisement can be taken to a new level, while being distributed within any number of applications in the App Store. Since iAds are built with open web standards instead of Objective-C, advertising with iAd should be a more cost efficient way of marketing within the App Store. iAd should increase App Store marketing reach and effectiveness.

When you watch the demo, the most obvious and important aspect of iAd is that it enables advertisers to deliver value to customers without requiring a purchase and while mitigating disruption. One less obvious advantage that the iAd platform has is that it bares the Apple brand or, at the very least, brings Apple to mind via its omnipresent "i". Thanks to the Halo Effect, advertisements bearing the iAd logo at the bottom right might enjoy a more lenient first impression than competing ad platforms. As long as iAd advertisers create interactive, emotional, and valuable ads, iAd's mind share will continue to grow and strengthen. Without a vetting process, similar to that of The Deck or the App Store, advertisers may get lazy and abuse the iAd brand and feature set. It would become too easy for advertisers to fall back to repetitive, emotionless, valueless advertising reminiscent of that which we see so often today. I expect a vetting process to be part of iAd in order maintain the association of its brand with value-driven advertising.

We still know very little about iAd. The event last Thursday was only an introduction, yet competitors who either recognize or deny the potential of the platform are already slinging questions about perceived holes in the platform. Traditionally, Apple iteratively improves it products -- focusing on core features and later adds lower priority features. The same process may occur with iAd, but it is far too early to tell and the platform is far too disruptive to mobile advertising for it to matter much. 

As consumers and marketers, we at Digitaria are excited by the introduction of iAd. Our company is perfectly suited to not only concept mini-campaign iAds, but fully staffed to build them. I hope that the platform proves to be as revolutionary as I believe that it will. I hope that its success eventually propagates to the desktop browser and that it sets new standards in advertising on all platforms, not only mobile.

Chuck Phillips CTO

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