iAd Struggles, Apple Adjusts
It’s no secret that Apple likes to run a tight ship when it comes to its own products and services. In the mobile industry, this is most apparent in the vetting process each mobile app undergoes before Apple allows it into the App Store, but Apple’s insistence on quality control extends to its mobile ad service iAd as well. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be working in Apple’s favor and it is now having to make adjustments.
Tailored specifically for Apple mobile devices and meticulously designed “not to suck,” iAd is actually favored by many developers. However, all the things that make iAd a seamless marketing experience for the end user are precisely what raise problems for it in the real world. In other words, when it comes to mobile advertising, the people you want to impress aren’t the developers, but rather the advertisers who are going to be purchasing the product in the first place. These advertisers aren’t wild about restricting their publicity to a single line of products and thus vastly limiting their exposure to potential markets, nor are they particularly delighted about Apple’s strict guidelines for formats and standards. iAd allows existing apps to remain open when a user clicks on an ad, thereby requiring development of a high quality in-app app. A great many advertisers would rather just hang their banner and be done with it.
All these factors lead to advertising fill rates that were not meeting expectations, so Apple’s made a few changes. While characteristically remaining insistent on the high quality of the marketing experience, Apple softened the prohibitive pricing structure to make iAd an attractive option for more advertisers. Apple also invited major advertisers for “campus visits” in order to woo them over to the wonders of its iAd platform. Whether or not iAd can make serious inroads into the impressive market share enjoyed by Google’s AdMob remains to be seen, but one thing we know for certain: Apple does nothing half-heartedly, so it may only be a matter of time.
