“Most Mobile Ads Really Suck”

Yesterday Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iAd mobile platform, which he said had the opportunity to make 1 billion ad impressions a day on tens of millions of Apple mobile device users. Steve Jobs says most mobile advertising sucks, so Apple will try to produce a better product.

iAds will allow applications developers to use advertisements in their apps, pocketing 60 percent of the revenue. Apple will sell and host the ads.

Jobs harshly criticized the current manner and look of mobile advertising, particularly search ads. He promised that iAds will foster more engaging advertising that will not pull users away from the content within apps.

“The average user spends over 30 minutes using apps on their phone. If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that’d be 10 ads per device per day — about the same as a TV show. We’re going to soon have 100m devices. That’s a billion ad opportunities per day!” said Jobs.

Jobs’ approach represents a dramatic shift in thinking about the delivery of mobile ads, and an obvious move by Apple to set itself apart from Google Inc, which made its name on search ads.

The smart money is on Apple offering advertisers a hypertargeting capability for location-based advertising so that consumers get ads based on their locality at any given time.

“Everyone will be following this very closely,” says Josh Lovison, the mobile lead at Interpublic’s Emerging Media Lab, adding: “Given the way that Apple is able to package things up, with very slick presentations, it will be interesting to see what they do with that advertising.”

If I’m Google I might be saying, “iAd. Ay Yi Yi!”