Just what we need… More advertising options!

Apple announced its iAds platform recently. In the demo I watched for Pixar’s new animation (Toy Story 3) it did look like an incredible advertising medium. In the case of Toy Story, its iAd is a fully interactive advertising system enabling people to view ‘shorts’, find cinema locations, download wallpapers and much more.

Apple claims that the average iPhone user spends 30 minutes every day engaging with the Apps they’ve downloaded from iTunes, and they estimate that with 100 million iPhones in the market showing 10 Ads every 30 minutes, that makes for a potential daily ad impression count of a cool billion.

Importantly, they’ve re-engineered the platform to include iAds in the phone’s operating system, so unlike normal app Ads (think AdMob) you don’t need to leave your application to interact with the advertisement, and you can stop watching/interacting with it at any time and go back to where you left off.

While the demos look great, they really only seem to suit big brands with deep, deep pockets. The problem as I see it will be how small to medium business could be able to afford to pay an expensive development house to develop their own iAds.

Steve Jobs fobbed off about how a developer could bust out a full interactive iAd in an afternoon. But from my experience in web development, there are a hell of a lot of hours spent on the creative, planning, design and IA before a developer gets anywhere near building anything.

Gazing into the crystal ball for a moment, I can see that if iAds do take off (and with Apple leading the charge, they probably will) web development houses, digital agencies and advertising agencies will be bolstering their service offering to include the creation of interactive iAds.

Big brands, digital agencies and Apple will be the winners, with smaller, ‘up and coming’ brands needing to pay through the nose to get a look-in, not just for the iAd development, but they’ll also need to factor in the click (or ‘touch’) costs as well…

Twitter’s next; they’ve been in a weird, stop/start half-pregnant advertising mode for what seems like ages.

Seriously, I’ve given up waiting for Twitter to get its act together. Every week, someone, somewhere writes an article about some Twitter Ad they’ve seen. The latest one comes from Search Engine Land, which has seen promoted trending topics. Surprise, surprise, it relates to Toy Story 3.

What’s hilarious is when you type into Google “advertising on Twitter” to try and find out what’s going on, the number one result is the clever dude that scored this Twitter channel: https://twitter.com/advertising. Twitter and SEO don’t mix too well.

If you search hard enough, Twitter has this blog post about their new platform (which like Apple’s iAds) is only available to a select group of “innovative advertising partners” – so as usual, we have to wait until they’ve got the “formula right” before smaller brands get a chance to play.

But it should be a lot of fun when we can finally engage in these exciting new platforms and audiences. Bring it on.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.