When you think about the state of marketing these days it can give you a dizzy feeling. With new technology, new networks, the slow death of old media, and most recently the release of the iPad. I’ve included a video below that clearly demonstrates why it’s sometimes not too wise to be an early adopter to a new platform. I mention this now because here in a few short months Twitter will be releasing their sponsored Tweets–and what I see soon to follow is a rush by other platforms and the search engines to sell us on real time search marketing.
Let’s get back to the iPad. Apples and Steve Jobs answer to the sad state of mobile and iPad advertising is what is called the iAd. What is the iAd? Here is Apple’s press release:
“iAd, Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, combines the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads. Today, when users click on mobile ads they are almost always taken out of their app to a web browser, which loads the advertiser’s webpage. Users must then navigate back to their app, and it is often difficult or impossible to return to exactly where they left. iAd solves this problem by displaying full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app, and letting users return to their app anytime they choose.”
When Steve Jobs talked about the release of the iAd mobile marketing platform he virtually said it was going to create a perpetual motion machine… okay he didn’t go that far but he did have the room think this was a drastic change in marketing.
To be fair it does improve mobile marketing by leaps and bounds. But I wanted to cover a deeper issue here. That is the issue of early adoption.