How iPhone could boost the mobile advertising market

Last week, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs showed off the new iPhone 3G, the long awaited successor of the first Apple mobile phone. It doesn’t matter if you love Apple’s style, or haven’t been sleeping for months just waiting for the new phone to be announced; or if you hate all those bunch of black silhouettes with white headset cables sticking out their ears.

Since it was first unleashed on June 29th 2007, the iPhone has revolutionized the mobile phone market, creating a new way to access online services. Despite some minor missing features, the real breakthrough of the iPhone was the relevance given to browsing; together with e-mail client; the browser being the foremost door of reaching Internet content. The iPhone has a full built-in browser, and now, thanks to the new 3G connectivity, the surfing experience will be faster and smoother than ever.

Obviously, this new online experience will provide a brand new way for advertisers to reach their potential customers. Regardless the immense number of phones sold everyday, up to now mobile advertising has struggled to take off, basically because mobile phones have not quite represented an actual medium to transmit promotional messages good enough to reach a wide audience efficiently. Unfortunately, the development of mobile advertising strategies have been dilatory up until today.

As suggested by Adage, from now on, no more delay: with the iPhone (and every iPhone-like device) things are going to be different.

Firstly, the new browsing experience is being widespread all over the smart-phone customers interested in having this new Internet experience right in the tip of their fingers.

This tendency is evidenced by the relevant number of web apps (online applications downloaded from a browser but more similar to a native application rather than a classical web page), already developed for iPhone. The official page counts over 1700 web apps for the Apple device.

These applications could be used to host an advertising platform indirectly, or just promotional messages, advertisers could potentially use as “online showcases” to display its offered products.

Secondly, we do need to remember that Apple has opened another door, a door that leads straight to the iPhone core. With just a few simple steps, everyone can join the iPhone “road map”, get the software development kit and compile their own iPhone application; not just a web app, but a native software. Consequentially, advertisers could begin to evaluate opportunities to develop native applications made for both promotional and functional purposes.

Let’s think about - for example - a hotel brand, like Accor or Best Western: could both be great ideas to develop ideal hotel-maps that take advantage of GPS technology (embedded in the last iPhone 3G and in other devices), for showing the geographical distance between your current position and the nearest hotel while you’re on-the-go.

The decisive point here is that in order to plunge into the mobile advertising market, advertisers should not limit themselves by just trying to catch an existing ad space; they have to create that space, by trying to satisfy user demands by offering something useful, that’s readily available on the mobile, thus reaching their promotional goals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Marketing Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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