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Mediapost is claiming that Apple will announce its 'next big thing', a new personalized, mobile advertising system. The platform may be called iAd and will be unveiled on April 7 according to the report, four days after the launch of the iPad.
If true, congratulations to Mediapost on the scoop.
According to the report, the advertising platform is being called "revolutionary" and "our next big thing". Mediapost could give few details, and if their sources are correct, I'm sure developers or Apple personnel would be leery about divulging too much. Nonetheless, this move would be logical as Apple acquired mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless at the beginning of the year.
If tablet publishing is to take off, the iPad may need to have its own advertising platform to differentiate it from other forms of web or mobile mediums. Advertising can already be embedded into content through the traditional methods -- web based, app based, etc. But creating interactive advertising that makes iPad publications more valuable that traditional web advertising could spur the growth of the tablet as a platform. It would also, of course, be a profitable new revenue line for Apple.
Leeks concerning the iPad and Apple's mobile advertising plans have been minimal. Both Apple and Google have grown into such giants that few publishers or developers dare break silence. That makes this amusing story suspicious since neither company does anything casually.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Apple to announce new mobile ad platform on April 7 Mediapost reports; will iAd be Apple's 'next big thing'?
Week in Review
Short reads on a Saturday morning:
• iPad pricing was the issue of the week. With users set to receive their iPads starting one week from today, publishers that want their products available in the iTunes app store need to submit, price and get approval of those apps. A WSJ story slipped in a reference to their iPad pricing strategy at the end of a story concerning magazines and the iPad. Stating casually that the WSJ would charge iPad users a $17.99 a month subscription fee, a fee higher than what the journal is current offering readers for a combination of both the print edition plus online access. Was it a trial balloon, or Rupert Murdoch giving Apple the finger. (Later that week the WSJ ran a critical story about Apple's board of director.)
If to prove that Murdoch was deadly serious about paywalls, Murdoch's UK newspapers, The Times and Sunday Times announced that it would begin charging web readers £1 per day, or £2 per week for access to their online news. Will Tories start reading the more liberal Guardian? (Sorry, that was a joke.)
• App makers are gearing up for the iPad, as well. On Monday I interviewed Handmark's Jon Maroney, senior veep of mobile publishing, about what the vendor had up its sleeve. Handmark is already a leading developer of mobile apps for publishers, supporting not only the iPhone but other platforms such as Android and Blackberry. Maroney appears excited about the move to tablet publishing stating that "the whole beauty of the iPad is that you can pull in all kinds of additional information. We're going to see an explosion of innovation over the course of this year around that." The Daily News recently launched an iPhone app (iTunes link) developed by Handmark. It will be interesting to see if the paper is among the first on Apple's tablet, as well.
• Not everyone is jumping on board, of course. Although large publishers like HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan and Simon & Shuster have all signed agreement to sell their books through Apple's iBookstore -- set to launch the same day as the iPad, April 3 -- Random House has decided to opt out for now.
To recap, for those just waking up, there are several ways one can sell their books on the iPad: through Apple's iBookstore and their selling their own individual apps through the iTunes app store. The iBookstore will employ an "agency model" where the publisher sets their own price and receives 70 percent of the transaction, with Apple grabbing a 30 percent commission. This is the model Apple has used inside the app store to great success.
The other way is to develop your own apps, something Penguin Books CEO John Makinson (the gentleman to the left) said his company will explore. The disadvantage of this approach would be the development costs -- each book would require the creation of a new app. The advantage, though, would be that each book could receive special treatment -- adding multimedia elements like audio and video, as well as interactivity, even games. Also, because product would be unique, they could sell at a premium.
I might add that there is no reason a publisher couldn't take advantage of both models. One could sell a text and picture only version of a history book for the standard $9.99 in iBookstore, for instance. Then sell a much higher priced app version, complete with videos and interactivity, through the iTunes app store. The record labels already do this to a certain degree.
• The NAA put out is final report on the state of newspaper advertising for 2009 and it was down right ugly: print revenue declined 28.6 percent. Additionally, online advertising declined for the second year in a row -- by 11.8 percent in 2009 reflecting the dismal economy. This makes the fourth year in a row that newspaper print revenue has declined, and the seventh down year in the decade.
• On the bright side: neither RBI nor Nielsen Business Media announced major divestitures this week -- not that there is much left of the two formerly major B2Bs. But don't expect this to last as RBI, in particular, have several groups that would be very attractive to buyers. Any PEs out there want to invest? Just give me a call.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Photoblogging Friday - 12
For the second week in a row I've had to set aside a Photoblogging Friday post put together by our photography editor Dean Brierly. Dean is in Japan this week and his photograph from Jeff Alu will appear here next week. Last week we replaced that feature with a look back at the work of the great civil rights era photographer Charles Moore who died last week. This week we remember Jim Marshall, the great photographer known for his shots of rock and jazz musicians from the sixties and early seventies. Marshall died Tuesday night in New York.
In 1964 an already fairly well established young photographer moved back to San Francisco from New York and set up shop. “I drove a car cross-country, and moved into a small apartment in North Beach," Jim Marshall said in an interview for the magazine Double Exposure. “I was getting fairly well known and started shooting all the rock shows. I started doing some work for a small magazine out of L.A. called Teen Set, and did some of my most important shoots for them."
Top, left: John Coltrane, shot for the Prestige LP Settin' the Pace.
Bottom, right: Janis Joplin, Winterland 1968
Photographs © Jim Marshall
His timing could not have been better. He had once lived in the City and had taken some of the best shots of the great John Coltrane for Ralph Gleason, then the music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Marshall seemed to be everywhere in the rock scene after that shooting the first U.S. tours by Cream, the Who, the Beatles. He was at all the important rock events of the era -- Monterey in '67, Golden Gate Park in SF, Woodstock in '69 -- and his LP cover shots for the Allman Brothers Fillmore East
LP and others are iconic.
Marshall's shots were the result of a bit of luck. “He asked me for directions to a club. I told him I’d pick him up and take him there if he’d let me take his picture.” In addition to Coltrane, his shots of Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk are among the most famous of the jazz musicians.
For a while he lived in Greenwich Village where he took photographs of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and others. He returned to San Francisco where he remained the rest of his life.
Best Buy gears up for iPad sales; should publishers go retail? packaging publications like software
Eight day until launch and Best Buy is gearing up to start selling Apple's iPad tablet at stores that current have dedicated store-within-a-store space for Apple products.
MacRumors is reporting that the retail giant does not plan on opening early on Saturday, April 3 to accommodate iPad buyers as the store already enjoys a near monopoly on iPad retail sales -- buys can also pre-order the tablet on the Apple web site or go to an Apple retail store, as well.
As more and more publishers begin to get into the applications market, building apps for iPhones, Android, and now for the iPad, publishers find themselves involved in retail sales in a way they have not been before. Suddenly their newspaper or magazine is competing not only with other publications, but with games, business software, and music, video and movies.
I entered the newspaper business at the tail end of the golden years, a time when newspaper still spent money on radio and TV advertising, when soliciting for readership door-to-door was still the norm. My first professional job after getting my J degree was answering calls coming into the classified department after radio ads played our commercial (Two lines, ten days, five dollars!).
Now, newspapers are putting their product into the iTunes store, a place that contains no promotional space, and waiting for readers to find it. Sure they are letting their existing readership know about the app by printing a one inch story in their print editions, or putting up a button ad on their web sites -- but come on! its time to market!
The first time I saw those iTunes gift cards at a retail store I thought Apple had lost their minds. Why buy this card for $25 when all one needs to do is go online and buy what you want? My closed mind didn't realize they were targeting parents who wanted to give a their kids access to the online store where a credit card would be needed. The gift card, though, gave those under 18 the ability to create an account and get $25 worth of credit.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Bob Garfield moves on from ad reviews; will continue Advertising Age 'Listenomics' column
AdAge.com announced today that Bob Garfield will end his weekly ad reviews for Advertising Age, but will write a column concerning the "digital revolution". His often funny, always insightful reviews have been a mainstay of the news magazine for 25 years.
In addition to his work for Advertising Age, Garfield has been the co-host of On The Media, the weekly news program prodcued by WNYC and heard on many NPR stations. Brooke Gladstone is the co-host and managing editor of OTM.
A few days ago this profile of Garfield appeared on Business Insider.
