Delivering mobile ads based on the user’s location is one of the keys to shift mobile advertising up a gear and deliver greater relevance, higher revenues and better return on investment.
But Apple doesn’t want it to shift gear … not in iPhone apps at least. They’ve positively forbidden it and will reject apps that use location to deliver more relevant ads to the user.
Having recently bought its own ad network, Quattro Wireless, you might have thought that Apple could now deliver rich, interactive, targeted ads to iPhone owners and charge advertisers royally for the privilege.
It could also help app developers better monetize their apps, thus fuelling the creation of ever more free ad-supported apps on the app store. But therein lies the problem. Apple does not really need more free apps. There are over 150 000 apps in the app store, the majority of which are free. Services like Appsfire are springing up to solve the problem of how to discover apps in the haystack. Apple would probably much rather have more paid or micropayment-enabled apps in the store, rather than take a small commission on the relatively small proportion of ads that could be delivered through their own ad network via free apps. It is actually in their interest that advertising in iPhone apps does not pay.
And by outlawing it, they’re also causing trouble for their competitors like Google’s Admob which is leading the way in iPhone in-app advertising and would stand to gain a lot from enabling location based advertising.
This will lead to an even stronger differentiation between Apple and Google mobile offerings: The former offers a closed, premium, service for iPhone/iPad users paying for apps providing relevant, ad free location enabled services. The latter offers an open, wider choice of generally free, but warts-and-all apps for Android users serving up lots of potentially annoying location based ads. Well there you go. Are you a Mac or a PC?
