mobile

In an announcement earlier this week, Apple announced changes to its application development restrictions to boost mobile ads. If you heard a giant “whoop!” of joy in your office, it probably came from ours. Of course, this is good news for app developers, but it’s great news for advertisers, particularly our hyper-local clients.

Before these changes took effect, there were several applications we have engaged for advertising for our clients quite successfully. However, if the client wished to target a specific state or geographic area, we were restricted to selecting smart phone applications that were “allowed” to sell geo-targeted advertising in app, such as TVGuide or WhitePages. The reason? There were restrictions on selling geo-targeted advertising on apps that were not designed to “know” the user’s location. So if we wanted to advertise on a news application that didn’t have local content, or another application that didn’t have to know where the user was located in order to work, we could only do so with our national clients.

The new terms will keep in-application advertising on the iPhone open to other mobile competitors, as well as enable advertising services that operate cross-platform. Read the full story, including the allowance of use of third-party tools such as Adobe Systems’ Flash software, here.

And if you’d like more information on the success of adding in-application advertising to your online campaigns, contact us here!

In other words, is the emperor wearing clothes? We’ve seen this in the world of technology many times in the past few years, most recently with the release of the iPad (and buzz about the upcoming “iAd” mobile advertising platform). And we had a flurry of client calls in the weeks after the release of the iPad, most asking how they can get in on advertising in the “new mobile market.” As an agency, the most important thing we must consider with regards to placing media is ROI for the client. Although the numbers (and the hype) for mobile advertising have been all over the media, hype doesn’t necessarily mean ROI. The media calls mobile the “golden interactive loop,” but just how “golden” is it?

We saw it coming with the release of the iPad—Apple taking “dead aim at Google’s search advertising” with its iAd mobile advertising platform (MediaPost.com). The good news for agencies like ours is that it brings another competitor to the marketplace, expands the reach of our geotargeted, hyper-local mobile advertising. Yes, it has taken some time for publishers to get on the mobile advertising bandwagon, particularly with the dramatic increase in and technological improvements to mobile devices (such as the iPhone, Android, and other “smart” phones) over the past few years. Our agency has worked with some of the “early adapters” for some time now—Pandora, Yelp, and Google Mobile, among others—and with moderate success for our clients. They work wonderfully for national clients, but many in-app mobile platforms still lack geo-targeting capability and strong reporting functions.

We don’t see mobile digital advertising as a replacement for traditional online display ads (did we actually just use the word “traditional” to describe online advertising?!?), but it certainly is another option to offer for campaigns with specific demographic targets. For example, if we have a campaign that has a primary goal of reaching 18-34 year-old males with a precise number of impressions in mind, and a secondary goal of a high click-through and conversion rate (say, signing up on a web site), mobile advertising is something we would consider including in that proposal—from Pandora music to text ads—as long as the target demographic is right for the campaign. Ideally, what we’d like to see is more geo-targeting capabilities on these platforms, along with transparent reporting functions.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers conference in early June, Steve Jobs announced that the company has signed mobile ad campaigns for several large brands, including AT&T, Best Buy and Chanel, among others. TechCrunch also reports that in just eight weeks, Apple has garnered more than $60 million in iAd commitments for 2010 – or half of all mobile advertising spend forecasted for the second half of the year (according to Apple). The iAd platform will allow users to interact with ads from within an app – without disrupting their primary mode of engagement, whether that be playing a game or watching a video. The platform debuts on July 1.

Read more about Apple’s iAd mobile platform here and, as always, contact us directly if you have a product or service you’re ready to take to the (digital) streets!