My favorite iPhone app, surprisingly, is the New York Times app.
I know, I know.
It’s kinda boring and marks me as a fuddy-duddy.
Which I am.
But it is a great little app. It’s well organized, fast and very usable.  And it has some of the better iPhone app ads that I have seen.

These little ads slip up from the bottom of the article viewer and tend to be on the cleaner, less obnoxious side—low use of images, heavy on the branding, and unobnoxious colors.  IMHO, they do it right.  When you click on an ad, it keeps you in the app—it simply takes you to another page still contained within the app and its controls, so you can go back to what you were just reading.  What would be bad is if clicking on an ad opened a webpage; this would close the app down and launch a browser window.

As some of the more creative ad network players out there like AdMob and VideoEgg dabble with various models such as Cost Per Engagement (CPE) and begin to evolve their offerings, it makes me wonder how much the success of advertising on the iPhone depends on the evolution of the system and not just the networks.  The evolution of the iPhone and its app platform will certainly impact the effectiveness of these ads.  Click metrics and performance measurement capabilities of iPhone ads are certainly two vectors that will change as the system and platforms evolve, but also what an ad and its creatives can do and can be will change.

A new app SDK is coming out in a few weeks rumored to offer microtransaction capabilities in it, and the new iPhone and software release are due out sometime this summer, rumored to support background processing for apps.  This will change what the user can do with ads and likely bring the user app experience to a whole new level.  If a browser can be launched without shutting down the app (and, even better, if it can “pause” the app) that’s a whole new set of advertising opportunities.  If an ad can offer something that you want to buy right there, tempting you to burn a few of your digital dollars on an MP3 or video, or whatever—and if it can do so through a seamless microtransaction payment to your cell phone bill—that’s frictionless, fast and awesome.  Now my head is swirling with ideas like a QVC app, or an auction app that connects with in-app advertising, but alas, that’s crazy talk at this point.

Now if I could only get my iPhone to not drop calls, and deliver me voicemails within 6 hours of when people leave them, I would be a happy boy.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 9:55 am and is filed under Online Advertising. 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.