Advertising, the life blood of the media industry and the necessary evil that pays me the money I need to live in a warm apartment with a refrigerator full of vodka and bacon, just got a boost today thanks to Google and their new ad formats specifically tailored for the iPad. Now I know what you’re thinking, advertising stinks, but hey, the people who produce the content you love to consume need to feed and clothe themselves.
If you’re in the AdSense for Mobile Applications beta program, and are using the latest iPad SDK, then you’ll have access to three new different sized ads: the leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels), the banner (468 x 60 pixels), and the medium rectangle (300 x 250 pixels). Hopefully we’re not going to see people abuse this, like that one guy who copy and pasted the hit 90’s rock band Nirvana’s Wikipedia entry into an iPhone application and then sold it for $40.
Mobile advertising is only now starting to take off thanks to larger displays, with even more pixels, and extremely cheap run rates for campaigns. The phrase “analog dollars for digital dimes” is thrown around a lot these days when talking about the painful transition that the print media is making towards the internet. With mobile it’s more like “digital dimes for absolutely useless pesos”. Is Apple making anything off of iAds? They [Apple] sure don’t like to talk about, and at least one major company, Chanel, has said that they’re pulling out of Apple’s little experiment because they’re too controlling and don’t provide enough useful analytics.
Speaking about analytics, Nokia purchased Motally last week so they can give developers a rich set of tools to track what’s going on in their applications. There’s also pressure on RIM to purchase an ad network of their own so they can get in the game. What’s up with everyone attempting to peruse a complete vertical? If you buy a BlackBerry/iPhone/Nokia then you’re stuck in a little box as a developer and an advertiser, just so a handset manufacturer can make a few more pennies.
Not cool.