The iPad might finally turn mobile advertising into a juggernaut
Leave it to Apple to go ahead and change the game again. They did it with the iPod in 2001, the iTunes Store in 2003, the iPhone in 2007, and the App Store in 2008. Now, with the iPad, Apple is giving the world the gift of ubiquitous access to content through a device that is hyper-connected, light, inexpensive, and, like all Jobs-conceived products, beautifully immersive.
I’m not among those, however, who think that the device will instantly revive the dying old media dinosaurs. But I do think the iPad might finally turn mobile advertising into a juggernaut. With analysts projecting up to 1.5 billion wireless high-speed internet devices by 2013, and with mobile advertising spend expected to hit $13 billion at around the same time, the ground is certainly ripe for it.
What has constrained the mobile advertising industry thus far are the limitations imposed by the medium. With only small banners and text-based ads to play with, even the most creative mobile marketers are at a disadvantage relative to their web brethren, who have shiny new rich media units to play with. But the larger touchpad screen will give marketers a canvas to innovate and potentially even exceed the graphical richness of web page ad units.
Ultimately, what will make or break mobile advertising–and, by extension, any content distribution strategy based around mobile ad revenue–will be clickability. Web publishers learned the hard way that it’s tough to keep digital inventory sold out at premium prices when average click-through rates are sub-1%. The good news for Apple is that, to date, aggregate click-through rates on iPhone/iPod Touch have been well above-average, easily outpacing Blackberry and Android smartphones. If they’ve done that well within the structural limits imposed on ad units by the small-screen medium, the sky’s the limit for what they can do with a 9.7-inch LED display and the A4 system-on-a-chip that should easily handle even the heaviest graphical ad units. And where the clicks go, so go the dollars and the rest of the industry.
Jonathan Levitt
comment by Mark
Except that it’s not a mobile device. It’s mobile in so far as you can travel with it in the same way that you can travel with a laptop. But it’s not a device you’re going to whip out on a stroll down the street.
So, not really mobile. So, not a mobile advertising game changer.
comment by Huey Frittz
As an IT professional who is called upon by family members to solve home computer problems on an almost weekly basis, I have long argued that PCs (and I include Apple Macs in there) are hugely more complex than 905 of their owners need. I firmly believe that we need a home computer that works like a television, where no technical knowledge is needed to operate it,when you turn it on it just works and it doesn