Madison Avenue
Apple's iAd: The good and the bad
August 16, 2010: 6:40 AM ETTwo views of Cupertino's aggressive foray into the world of smartphone advertising
Source: Nissan
It's been four months since Steve Jobs unveiled iAd, Apple's (AAPL) bold bid to create a market for mobile ads that don't, in his words, "suck."
How's it going? That depends which report your read.
- It's great. Thursday's Los Angeles Times: Apple iAd partners say they're happy with early results.
- It sucks. Monday's Wall Street Journal: Apple's Ad Service Off to Bumpy Start.
The truth, we suspect, is somewhere between happy and bumpy. The L.A. Times quotes executives at Nissan and Unilever -- the first two of Apple's 17 launch partners to get their campaigns up and running -- who say they are pleased with the click-through rates. Nissan says customers spent an average of 90 seconds -- ten times longer than usual -- with the very first iAd, for Nissan's electric LEAF car, and tapped on it five times more frequently than they did on the online version.
The Journal article points out that Nissan and Unilever were the only launch partners to have ads running for most of July, and that at least one of the partners -- Chanel SA -- has already dropped out of the program. The Journal's sources say that Apple's insistence that its engineers produce the ads, not the agencies' creative teams, is driving Madison Avenue nuts. According to the Journal:
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Steve Jobs missed his calling
Forget Silicon Valley. He would have killed on Madison Avenue.
"I had forgotten," a colleague said recently, after an off-the-record meeting with Apple's (AAPL) CEO, "what an interesting and dedicated student Steve Jobs is of other people's businesses."
Take, for example, the advertising business.
If you are in the ad trade, or care about it, or just want to see a first-rate sales pitch, you could find worse ways to spend 15 minutes MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Apr 9, 2010 10:30 AM ET -
Facebook Is Headed for Madison Avenue
Why bother to rob banks? Facebook is where the real money is—and the fast-growing social network has not yet begun to tap its potential cash flow. But that will change within the next few months, says founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The lead-off batter at day one of the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, Zuckerberg turned in his usual deadpan performance, and yet managed to divulge a lot in what little MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Oct 17, 2007 8:24 PM ET
