Much like the introduction of the iphone in 2007 defined the smartphone, the introduction of the iAd platform from Apple will likely re-define mobile advertising as we’ve known it.

In short, Steve Jobs explained that iAd’s app ads will achieve the right balance between being interactive and emotional. He used the analogy that advertisements from the TV are emotional while flash ads on websites are interactive.

Here are three reasons why I believe iAds could really work for brands:

1. Users choose the site not the Ad – so by keeping the Ad experience self-contained within the existing page, Apple ensure a better user experience over most other types of mobile Ads.  This means brands and advertisers who are putting more and more of a premium on engagement vs. impressions will be satisfied
2. Speaking of experience, the level of interactivity possible through this platform looks impressive. It’s like building a full microsite flash experience – but without the flash or the need to build a stand-alone site.
3. Brands who do not yet want to commit to building a full mobile website or application to support a campaign no longer need to – you can do data collection (like for a contest) right within the iAd.  Having said that, engaging consumers through an iAd is only going to increase demand & expectations that there will be a mobile friendly experience accessible too.

One thing holding me back from fully embracing this platform is the reach potential of iAds in Canada. Although we will almost certainly run a test budget against the platform when it launches this summer, it cannot replace the established mobile networks overnight – especially as iphone’s market share is still only about 20% in Canada.

With that said, since iAd is built entirely on HTML 5, this platform can be extended to the mobile web which will instantly make your interactive iAd’s accessible to a much broader audience – even those on other smartphones!

Want to see more? Check out the demo below:

Last week I was in NYC for a new business conference (as tweeted) and I decided to pick up an iPad.

I’ve already blogged about all the reasons I wouldn’t be buying one - and all those reasons still stand true – but I decided it was my duty as a digital marketer to get familiar with it for research purposed only.

Here are my 10 first impressions during the first 6 days with it:

1. The sunset background image that comes default with the iPad has shooting stars. At first i thought they were scratches on the surface!
2. It’s actually smaller than I had imagined it would be – and many friends have made the same comment
3. It’s heavier than you’d expect it to be. Holding it with one hand is at most a 20 minute exercise. Best to hold with two hands
4. The icons are too spread out on the interface – they could be a lot tighter (like on the iphone / ipod). There should be an option to optimize your screen – even the size of the icons
5. Typing sucks. I still can’t get used to using a full touch-only based QWERTY keypad. Thankfully I have a bluetooth keyboard that i can throw in my bag
6. The mobile web is beautiful. It’s truly a great experience and in portrait mode you can fit about double of what you’d normally find “above the fold” on your desktop browser
7. There aren’t as many Apps as I would have expected – but the BBC App and the NBA Playoffs App are beautiful. I’ve been debating App vs Wap (or mobile web) for a while on smartphones, but so far App wins hands down for the iPad – especially with the larger screen and multi-touch capabilities. For the first time I feel like an interface designer can create something truly beautiful and functional at the same time.
8. Setup was a breeze. All my iphone Apps migrated over easily – although most don’t look that great. By default the app shows in its native size – but you can “double” it to fit most of the screen. Although this makes the App a bit pixelated, it’s still quite readable. One thought here – with the introduction of multi-tasking in the next major software update, it would be great if I could open 6-8 iphone apps all at once and arrange them on the big & beautiful iPad screen. It will be like creating my own personal App dashboard.  Bonus points – allow me to specify the size of each so that i could have my RSS reader down one side, tweetdeck along the other, and other apps in the middle.
9. For those of us who are “international” customers of Apple, you’ll need to get your own U.S. itunes ID in order to download or even access the App store for the iPad.  Considering the delay in releasing it in Canada (now end of May at the earliest) and longer in other countries, you can’t afford to wait.  Here’s what you do… first go buy a pre-paid MasterCard at your local Shoppers Drug mart. This will allow you to buy Apps against a “valid” credit card that doesn’t need a US address for verification. Go into itunes and create a new account. Change country of residence to US and input any US address. I just picked one from NYC – anything will do.  Setup & sync your new iPad while logged into your new US account. You are good to go!
10. Overall it’s a great media device and I love reading the news on it. It’s got great potential as a gaming platform – but it can’t replace my laptop or netbook and it’s too big to replace my iphone. I haven’t even setup email on the iPad.

This afternoon I decided to follow the live blog from Apple on their new iphone 3.0 software over at CNET.

Here are some highlights:

• Copy & paste functionality is finally coming to the iphone. It will work across the platform – including SMS messages. This has been the longest running complaint since the original 2G version
• Cross-device search feature also arrives – allowing you to search for anything from anywhere – including applications.
• Landscape keyboard now available in all applications – not just web browsing
• New voice memo abilities
• MMS capability – but only for 3G phones
• Expanded software developer kit (SDK) that will allow for subscriptions for applications and increased video and audio streaming abilities
• Expanded bluetooth capabilities – including support for stereo bluetooth (only for 3G). This should be especially exciting for proximity marketers who have not been able to bluecast to iphones until now

Things we were hoping for that didn’t happen:

• Tethering – which would allow your device to act as a wifi hub for your laptop, game machine etc… although they did say the ability to do so was now part of the platform but it would be up to the carriers to enable it on their side
• No multi-tasking / background abilities. This means you can only run one application at a time – unlike the Palm Pre which will allow you to run several background apps. The reason is apparently the need to conserve battery power
• No flash lite support (unlike new Nokia & Palm devices)
• No hardware preview of the next generation iphone

Overall the updates addressed most of the major user complaints about the iphone and positions them well to stay competitive with the Palm Pre.

Here we go again…  here are my 10 informed best guesses on what will happen in the Canadian market place this year. Click here to see how I did against last year’s predictions. 

1. It will be the year of the App store. Every manufacturer in the smartphone space will have a mobile application store, but Apple will continue to dominate the market because they are the only ones who focus on usability first
2. There will be several new models of the iphone announced and launched this year – including a “nano” version.  I predict that copy & paste will still not be among one of its many features
3. Palm Pre will do better than any Android device. Friends, peers and industry pals all mocked me for predicting that they would make a come back when I published some predictions in August, but I’m sticking with this one
4. Mobile security and privacy will become a big focus for marketers and the industry as more people use feature rich smart phones (25% of Canadians are already on them)
5. Mobile payment systems will finally reach retail as both MasterCard and Visa should be ready to go  
6. MMS will fail to reach its promise as the market shifts to the mobile web for richer experiences
7. Both Bell and Telus announce GSM compatibility / network infrastructure upgrades in order to get a piece of the lucrative GSM roaming market and to counter efforts by new regional and national carriers who will be entering the marketing in Q4
8. Microsoft will release a new OS for mobile that includes a 2d code reader that supports their own proprietary M-Tag.  This will finally bring 2d codes into the mainstream in North America
9. All major Canadian news / content websites will have a specific mobile enabled website
10. 40 Billion SMS messages will be sent in Canada – up from about the 20 Billion fore-casted in 2008.

What do you think? Feel free to comment /add your own predictions.

Reliance is like the SONY of India – doing major deals in the U.S. ranging from hunting for U.S. startups to striking deals with Dreamworks. They have over 100 million customers and touch 1 in 10 Indians every day.

Zapak.com, one of Reliance’s ADA companies and India’s largest PC gaming site, has connected with U.S.-based, Greystripe, to add 900+ mobile games and applications to their mobile offering, essentially offering the App Store experience, except all of the games are free and ad-supported.

With everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft launching their own versions of game and application storefronts for cell phones in the U.S., Greystripe is one of the first companies to provide a solution similar to an app store in India.

As proven through the popularity of Apple’s App Store, mobile games and applications are a critical category for media companies looking to get into the mobile market.

What’s interesting here?

• India’s biggest media company is looking to seize on an App Store-like experience for the 5.1 million registered game players on Zapak
• Media companies, including NBC and now Reliance, are all want their own versions of branded app store like distribution – and they’re partnering with established content providers and networks such as Greystripe
• Look for this trend to continue across the industry with other media giants

This week Yahoo! announced that they now know where you are… well as long as you give them permission first with their new Fire Eagle location based services (LBS) platform.  

Isn’t Fire Eagle really another term for describing a phoenix… as in the rising of the Phoenix - or is that a bit too ironic… or iconic for them given everything they’ve gone through with Microsoft this year?

Marketers should be really excited about this new platform. Besides making social networking kinda creepy (as blogged here last November), it adds context and relevance to your online ads.

Adding location (aka relevance) to an online behavioural targeting program attached to a CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per action) model is an online marketer’s wet dream. 

The way Fire Eagle works is that you either tell it where you are (country, city, town, zip etc…), or give permission for GPS enabled devices to do it on your behalf.  Fire Eagle will then publish your location information to the services that you have approved – whether it be a restaurant review site or facebook. Relevant ads will follow.

The neat thing about this new service is that it is completely open to the development community with a robust API – which means you can add geo-specific information to virtually any web service you want. It could be as silly as tracking where your friends are on the way to Collingwood for that weekend getaway on a google maps mashup. It would be like getting directions then seeing where people are relevant to those directions.

Already over 50 services have adopted Fire Eagle’s platform into their own offering including Six Apart’s blogging service Movable Type, messaging platform Pownce and neighborhood news site Outside.in

Whether or not this service will compete with Apple (they have similar services on their iphone platform) or the upcoming Google Android platform or becomes a complimentary web service to the above remains to be seen.

I’m not sure people really want everybody to know where they are at all times… but fortunately you can control your own settings – even manually update location to defer people from where you actually are…. like saying your current location is your home address where you are “working from home” instead of announcing that you are actually on the golf course AGAIN on a Friday afternoon

The CWTA released their quarterly report last week and highlights are consistent with year long trends.

More Canadians are texting more often.

It will be interesting to see if proposed new charges for incoming texting as announced last week by Bell and Telus will impact overall numbers. It will also be neat to see the impact of the iphone…  will Canadians text even more or will they simply migrate to mobile instant messaging (MIM), Twitter, and other mobile web based communication options?

I know – it’s not just about the iphone – super awesome third generation mobile devices from Blackberry (Bold), Palm (Centro) and Samsung (Instinct) promise to make the next quarter an exciting one for our market.

Here are some highlights to the report:

• 4.1 billion messages were sent peer to peer in Q1 (note messages related to mobile marketing campaigns are not counted). Note that 10.1 billion were sent in all of 2007
• 1.4 billion messages were sent in March 2008 alone
• 42% of Canadian mobile subscribers sent at least one peer-to-peer message in March 2008. Imagine what that number would if your friends who return your text with a phone call because they don’t know how to text… figured it out?
• MMS-capable common short codes were made available for the first time
• As of May 14th, North America’s first user-generated mobile picture messaging service on broadcast television was launched in Canada
• There are 25 active mobile micro-payments (m-commerce) applications approved in Canada

For those who have been following my blog for a while will recognize this phrase “user experience will trump superior technology – every time.”

Apple has proven this again and again… and this past week as the world rushed to get their second generation or 3G iphone (and crashing Apple’s itunes server in the process!) it will again be the user experience not the technology that will give this device staying power.

Don’t get me wrong – a thinner version with better reception and real GPS is super awesome – but it’s what comes with the new software OS that really makes this device a consumer’s (and potentially a marketer’s) dream.

The 2.0 OS software on the iphone is backwards compatible with your first generation iphone – so the 200,000 or so first generation iphones in Canada will be able to upgrade and enjoy many of the benefits of the second generation device.

Specifically as a marketer, I’m most excited about the App store – think of it as itunes for software designed specifically for your iphone. No longer will you have to jailbreak your iphone to customize and personalize it to meet your needs. Like itunes, you’ll be able to select what apps (games, productivity software etc…) you want and let the app store do the rest.

iphone apps are like widgets for your blackberry – but far easier to download

Smart marketers will also leverage the localization capabilities of the device to bring you a mashup of something truly useful.

Marketers who think mobile marketing is all about text to win campaigns are missing out on the r/evolution of interactivity.  If you’ve hired one such company to work with your brand or agency, you need to rethink your strategy before submitting those 2009 budgets which are due shortly…

With yesterday’s report from the Globe and Mail that both Bell and Telus would start charging 15 cents for incoming SMS messages for customers who are not locked into an SMS plan and Roger’s announcement of a data plan for the new iphone that was widely seen as uncompetitive and unfair to consumers, I figured the future of mobile as a mass marketing medium would be still-born until new carriers enter the market next year.

All may not be lost

In reaction to all the negative press received over their original iphone plan, Rogers / Fido this morning announced a new data plan for the new 3G iphone to be released Friday of this week.  Here are some details:

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate until August 31, 2008 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan. For example, with 6GB of data, iPhone 3G
users can visit 35,952 web pages, or send and receive 157,286 emails, or watch 6,292 minutes of YouTube videos each and every month.

You can read the full news release here.  Rogers has also indicated that they will not charge for incoming SMS messages either – making them appear far more pro-consumer than they did just a week ago.

Per my earlier post this week, I still wouldn’t rush to buy that new iphone. Rates and plans are bound to only get better from here.

Many people buy Apple products because they are great fashion accessories.

The ultimate fashion accessory was big news last week as Steve Jobs announced the much anticipated SDK (software developer kit) for the iphone which will allow developers to create applications, utilities, and games leveraging the same platform Apple used to create their own widgets. Starting in June of this year, consumers won’t have to “jailbreak” their phone in order to customize it.

Also starting this June, enterprise users will no longer have to beg their I.T. / technical support department to open up the corporate email server to hackers and SPAM attacks in order for them to access their email from their nifty iphone.

The iphone will be getting some proper business chops.  

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