Quoting Nissan senior manager Chad Jacoby from the LA Times, “What iAd promises is the most progressive thing I’ve seen to date” in digital advertising. North American Unilever media director Rob Master too called it, “a good start,” and is planning to launch a second iAd for the Klondike bar, while noting the success of the Dove soap iAd which resulted in a 20% return rate of viewers who wanted to check out the contents again. Campbell soup, DirectTV, and even General Electric are planning to jump on board. iAd is becoming one of Apple’s most incredible successes, securing $60 million in advertising commitments for 2010.
Dictionary.com said on Wednesday that the amount it could charge for its ad space had increased 177% since it enabled iAds in its iPhone app, and CBS Mobile Senior Vice President Rob Gelick said the company’s six apps – including apps for CBS Sports, CNET, and GameSpot, were seeing up to $25 CPMs (the cost advertisers pay for an add to appear a thousand times.)
iAds are advertisements done right. Nissan reports that consumers stay on their iAd for an average of 90 seconds – ten times longer than user’s spent looking at their online ads.
Though neither Apple nor the advertisers would share revenue or traffic numbers, they noted that their pilot iAds tended to pull in users and keep them interested for significantly longer than other kinds of digital ads.
With developers finally getting their hands on iAds, the potential for developer success stories is huge. Too, iAds are embodying the vision Steve Jobs had: to make something that’s both emotional and interactive. Consumers are staying on advertisements longer because there are items of interest that keep people hooked – there isn’t just an advertisement and some annoying sales pitch. Short, consumable, yet engaging content is what keeps people interested in this form of mobile advertising.
