Saving the best for last at the this year’s World Wide Developer Conference – at least from a developer’s and mobile marketer’s perspective – Apple CEO Steve Jobs dedicated a significant chunk of his keynote address to the iAds platform and its ostensible objective: “To help our developers earn money.”
Jobs announced this morning that he expects the iAd platform to take up 48% of the entire mobile ad market for the second half of 2010.
“Apple hosts and sells the ads, so all you have to do is tell us where you want them and make the money,” Jobs noted.
“We’ve only been selling ads for 8 weeks, and I’d like to just show you about some of the brands that will be advertising with us during the second half of the year.” At that point, some of the biggest brands in the world were touted: AT&T, Chanel, GE, Nissan, Citi, Unilever, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, Geico, Campbell’s Sears, JC Penney, Target, Best Buy, DirecTV, TBS, and Disney.
“We’ve got advertisers committing to $60 million.”
Demonstrating the Nissan ad for their electric car, Steve Jobs provided further insight into how pertinent iDevices and iAd platform will be to mobile advertising and product promotion in the coming months and years. If, for example, you want to buy a Nissan Leaf, you have to register through the ad on the iPhone.
iAds on the iPhone will fire up and launch for all iOS 4 devices July 1st.
