iPhone Advertising on the iAd Network

In an age when advertising is becoming more and more ubiquitous, advertisers must search deeper and deeper to find novel, untapped spaces to advertise their products to their target audience. Marketing and advertising platforms have evolved well beyond the traditional radio, television and print ads, with the Internet being the largest forum to reach potential customers. As advertisers continue to explore and exhaust new territories (such as temporary tattoos that fighters wear into the ring), a logical step forward is to deliver ads to smartphones, such as the ever-popular Apple iPhone.

iPhone advertising is not exactly a new concept. Since the iPhone is a web-enabled device, users are exposed to advertising every time they fire up their mobile browser to do some surfing or check their e-mail and find spam advertising. Even using mobile phones as a way to promote products is not novel, with ads being delivered via SMS (text messaging) for years. Apple, however, has been seeking to change the way iPhone advertising is delivered and how the user interfaces with the ads that he sees.

Enter Apple's iAd advertising platform. The advertising network, announced in April 2010, delivers advertisements within iPhone applications, allowing companies to deliver interactive advertising that users can see and explore from inside the application, without being redirected to web content via their browser. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said of iAd that that it "offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web," a move which is hoped to benefit not only Apple and the companies buying ad space, but also the users and the software programmers. The ads will be served and sold by Apple, and software developers receive a substantial portion of the ad revenue.

The "in-app" nature of the advertising is meant to be more encouraging to users, who are expected to be more willing to look into an ad that does not kick them out to their web browser, but instead stays in the application they were already using, so they can get right back to what they are doing. In addition to the iPhone, iAd will also be available for the iPad and iPod Touch.