This week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 4. While Jobs boasted that this is the thinnest smartphone available, its new features could be pretty big for marketers – specifically the iAd mobile application.
Speaking at WWDC 2010, Jobs said, “iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps.”
Marketers should be paying attention to the immersive advertisements released through iAd, which will be available to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users. This is a highly desirable demographic for advertisers – the Washington Post reports that marketers are finding users spend more time with ads on iPads than traditional web slots, and a recent study from comScore reveals that nearly 73 million mobile users accessed their browsers on their mobile devices in April 2010, alone.
One company that is certainly taking note of the new iAd feature is Google. The search engine giant has released its own mobile advertising network – Google Mobile Ads. The tool targets ads for high-end devices like the Android or iPhone.
Interestingly, another search engine that will make an appearance on iPhones this year is Bing. Between iAd and the addition of Bing, new Apple features could give Google some competition this season. Yet, while Microsoft now take its place alongside Google and Yahoo on the iPhone search options, Google will remain the default option on Apple’s mobile devices.
Moreover, StatCounter reports that Google currently occupies 97.83 percent of the global mobile search engine market.
