Ever since the debut of the first iPad two years ago, marketers have been jazzed about the potential of tablets as a new advertising platform. And not just to run banner ads or even mobile ads, but to run the kind of rich magazine or even TV-style ads that still command most of the advertising dollars spent. "The tablet is the TV of this generation," says Jason Baptiste, CEO of the tablet publishing and advertising platform startup Onswipe. "It's the beauty of print married to the scale of the Web."
Yet to date, revenues from advertising on tablets have been underwhelming, because marketers haven't yet caught up to a medium that essentially didn't exist until a year or so ago. Because of the lack of standards that exist both in print and online, says Rex Briggs, CEO of the marketing analytics firm Marketing Evolution, "mobile advertising especially on tablets is not getting its fair share of advertising dollars."
Today, however, we have the new iPad, due out March 16. And it could change the game. No, the new version isn't so radically different from its predecessors, so it won't single-handedly change the dynamics of the nascent market, at least not right away. But several features of this new model likely will help accelerate tablet advertising this year:
* It's got an even better screen. The comfortable size of the iPad screen, more or less magazine-sized but with a screen that's even better than your high-definition television, opens up even more possibilities for ad formats. Not just new ones, such as interactive ads or apps that are essentially ads. For the first time, traditional magazine ads and TV ads suddenly become compelling on a computing device. Baptiste says Onswipe's analysis indicates that tablet ads, even if they're essentially repurposed magazine ads, have up to 100 times the engagement of banner ads.
Advertisers can run rich, colorful brand ads in a way that never has worked well on the PC, because despite its name, it's not very personal, or at least not cozy like an iPad you can touch. There's simply a huge difference between an ad you have to click on to view or run and an ad you just have to tap on or swipe to see. And the format of tablet publications ensures that you'll view ads more than you do on a PC screen no matter how big, because unlike most banner ads, they generally appear full-size on full page just like in a magazine.
So far, advertisers haven't taken full advantage of the possibilities, as my analysis of the recent Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue demonstrated. But even the standard ads rendered in digital form are instantly familiar to readers, meaning they're less likely to be ignored. Indeed, a study early last year found that purchase intent after viewing iPad ads was 59% higher than the print ad.
* It's faster. At least the new 4G versions will be, and the processor running the machines is twice as fast as well. Both are key, especially for new, more interactive ads that marketers are starting to deploy, sometimes as apps. Baptiste says that with the promise of a faster iPad, Onswipe has recently been asking publishers and advertisers to submit full high-resolution versions of print ads because now they will render fast enough on the iPad to load quickly enough that they won't annoy readers.
What's more, video commercials become that much more possible without waiting for them to load, and that opens up more avenues for traditional brand storytelling. "A number of advertisers are combining ads that can look like print but with a touch can play video like television," says Tony Nethercutt, North America general manager for the mobile ad network Mojiva.
Not least, the higher speed and bandwidth paves the way for even more interactive ads. So far, I haven't seen really compelling examples, but again, that's because the popularity of tablets has taken marketers and their ad agencies by surprise. They're not sure what to do yet, so they're holding back on spending on tablet ads. That's a mistake, says Briggs: "Marketers should be diving head-first into tablets," he says.
* It allows Apple to sell older iPads cheaper. The iPad 2, which will continue to be sold, now starts at just $399. (And iPads aside, let's not forget the $200 Kindle Fire, which has sold millions in a few months.) That may mean a lot more than any cool new feature, because it means a lot more tablets will end up in the hands of a wider range of people. In the end, the brand advertisers that still own the largest budgets in advertising are looking for large audiences. And already, the owners of Apple's mobile devices, including iPads, is pretty sizable, at 172 million iOS devices sold--a stunning 62 million of them in the last three months of 2011 alone. If that accelerates, as seems sure to happen, marketers no longer will be able to ignore what is in all likelihood the next big ad medium.
