iAd-- The new advertising buzz word

Although it lacked a new iPhone, the Apple iPhone OS 4 announcement this afternoon will leave users, developers and advertisers anything short of disappointed.  Steve Jobs unveiled iAd, Apples advertising platform that will enable advertisers to create ads that will run within applications, instead of connecting users to Safari and out of the app. This process has discouraged users from clicking on in-App ads. 

iAd opens the doors for mobile advertising to become relevant.  Steve Jobs exaplained, "We have a lot of free or reasonably priced apps... we like that, but our devs have to find ways to make money. So our devs are putting ads into apps, and for lack of a better way to say it, we think most of this kind of advertising sucks."  Consumers seek out interaction online, and ad's need more than a little bit of motion  to pull people in, especially on the small screen real estate of an iPhone. 

There are five key features of iAd:
1) Emotion and Interaction
2) Ads keep you in the app
3) Built into iPhone OS
4) Apple sells AND hosts the ads
5) 60% of revenues --> developers

It's going to be interesting to see how advertisers and clients will adapt to this new mobile platform.  Job's demoed an ad for the new Toy Story 3 movie on the iAd platform, and it included embedded videos, posters and even games.  It's almost like an sub-app within an app.  But here is the kicker: it's all built using HTML5. 

HTML5 is a major hot topic for mobile advertising and rich media, in general.  The question will become, are agencies going to be will to develop content for iAd since it will only reach about 40% of the US population of phone users.  It has potential, but we must wait and see what developers can do with it.