Apple seeks new global communications manager for its iAd network

Posted:
in General Discussion edited May 2015
Apple on Tuesday began searching for a new global communications mangager for iAd, its iOS-based mobile advertising network, marking another high-level position opened up to the public.




The successful candidate will be expected to "lead marketing positioning, strategy and communications" for iAd, including internal and external channels. Accordingly the company is asking for someone with at least five to seven years of experience in strategic marketing communications, and preferably another two to three years related to a specific marketing or communications discipline, such as public relations.

iAd is an active concern for Apple, but has largely sat in the shadow of multi-platform ad networks run by the likes of Google and Facebook. When the service first launched in 2010, Apple initially targeted the wealthiest advertisers, asking for a $1 million minimum buy.

Early partners complained about Apple's strict content rules and hands-on control. The company was forced to repeatedly cut the minimum buy in order to attract clients, and now allows for iAd campaigns costing as little as $50.

Public openings for high-level positions at Apple are relatively rare. Earlier this month, though, the company posted a listing for a director of global marketing operations at its Beats division.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member

    Fifty bucks! That's more like it.

  • Reply 2 of 6

    iAds would do a lot better if they used the bar for useful information like the weather forecast, top news stories, stock prices, sports scores, road alerts when traveling and so on. Currently users just ignore the iAd bar because all it shows is ads. How well would a radio channel do if all it played was ads? For that matter look what happened to Playstation Home which was a giant 3D virtual world of ads. To get people's attention you need to mix the ads with useful information.

  • Reply 3 of 6
    thewhitefalconthewhitefalcon Posts: 4,453member
    It's time to shut iAd down. If they lose some apps so what? They were likely garbage anyway. I don't like where this leads.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    It's time to shut iAd down. If they lose some apps so what? They were likely garbage anyway. I don't like where this leads.

    It says here it only has 2.5% of US revenue share:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/12/18/how-apple-is-revamping-its-iad-platform/

    This suggests worldwide it is below 0.7% revenue:

    https://www.majority.co/mobile-ad-share-2015/

    Some developers said it gave more revenue to them than admob but the intention of iAd might have been to cut Google out from profiting from iOS and it's not succeeding in doing that. Google makes a lot of its mobile profit from iOS. At one point they made 4x more than from Android but that might not still be the case.

    I think digital advertising is all wrong. When ads are done in print, they don't seem all that obtrusive but digital ads are irritating. I never felt like that reading a magazine or newspaper. The revenues are tiny too. Averages are around $0.10 CPM that's 10 cents for 1000 ad impressions. If each user would see 10 ads per day then that needs 100 users to make 10 cents or 0.1 cents per day per user.

    Kids don't have money of their own but they can get iTunes credits. Why not have a pay per use system that uses more credit the more people play? Give a kid a $5 topup voucher and that would let them play 5000 days worth of a normally ad-supported game or 500 days of 10 games etc. If a game gets 1 million downloads and these million people play it every day for 1 month, they each get charged 3c and the developer gets $30k in a month. No ads.

    The system would work better with an advance topup so you have to have a balance first to play compatible apps and a $5 topup would last ages. They can adjust the rates to see what would suit. Apple can even bundle a $5 topup charge with a new device so that people make sure to start with that. The vast majority of iOS revenue is from in-app purchasing, ad revenue is tiny so ads just don't need to exist.

    Developers wouldn't have to worry about fill rates or CPM or where to fit ads in, they just click a button to require lets call it Revenue Stream compatibility and the download would be free but to access either all of the app or parts of it, it would require that the user has a Stream balance that gets depleted while using the app and it can prompt for a topup making it clear the amount is for months of usage of multiple apps and content.

    This model would work for more than apps, it would extend to Newsstand where you would just open any article you wanted and it would take revenue out of the Stream like an advert would generate revenue. It can even be integrated into websites so that when an Apple device visits a site, all the ads just vanish and they use the Stream instead. Youtube can get rid of ads too like before. This would be optional in other apps if people prefer ads.

    They would have to test it to see if people would be willing to do that, they might have to give a credit first to get people to use the system but who honestly wouldn't pay $1 for a topup that lasted 2 months? Apple Pay, tap and done.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    Marvin wrote: »
    Developers wouldn't have to worry about fill rates or CPM or where to fit ads in, they just click a button to require lets call it Revenue Stream compatibility and the download would be free but to access either all of the app or parts of it, it would require that the user has a Stream balance that gets depleted while using the app and it can prompt for a topup making it clear the amount is for months of usage of multiple apps and content.

    This model would work for more than apps, it would extend to Newsstand where you would just open any article you wanted and it would take revenue out of the Stream like an advert would generate revenue. It can even be integrated into websites so that when an Apple device visits a site, all the ads just vanish and they use the Stream instead. Youtube can get rid of ads too like before. This would be optional in other apps if people prefer ads.

    They would have to test it to see if people would be willing to do that, they might have to give a credit first to get people to use the system but who honestly wouldn't pay $1 for a topup that lasted 2 months? Apple Pay, tap and done.
    Perhaps something like Google Contributor?
    http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/20/7255779/google-contributor-will-let-you-pay-to-see-sites-without-ads
    In the past couple of weeks they've expanded it even more.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    gatorguy wrote: »
    Perhaps something like Google Contributor?
    http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/20/7255779/google-contributor-will-let-you-pay-to-see-sites-without-ads
    In the past couple of weeks they've expanded it even more.

    In a way; I hadn't heard about that:

    https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

    but it would be cheaper doing pay-per-use than monthly payments. Topups can get annoying but $5 once a year wouldn't be so bad. A better target would be apps or magazines first, maybe Google can integrate it into apps. They can put it into admob if they want so that if people have a balance then it takes from the balance, otherwise it shows an ad and that way you'd know the balance was out but they could only do that system-wide on Android. I was going to suggest it for Beats too so it depletes the revenue when listening to streaming music. Although this is lower than they'd get with paid subscribers (1/10th-1/20th), they'd get more users. With websites alone, it would have too slow of a start because you wouldn't easily distinguish between a paid site and free/ad-site. Plus you have to be signed in for a browser to know, which with Google might be tracking you. It should ideally be a system-wide thing that works for a variety of content. It would help sites like Wikipedia that don't want to be funded by ads.

    It's nice to know that Google appreciates that the ads their entire business is based on are so annoying that people might be willing to pay to get rid of them. If it took off, that would make digital content so much nicer. Just 1-2c per day and no more ads ever, no trackers, no Flash, nothing popping up during videos. Apple can do it system-wide on iOS, Google can do it system-wide on Android and with admob and their own sites.

    To kick it off quickly, they can do a bundle with new devices. Apple sells over 250m iOS devices so adding a $1-5 bundle into the price would give them an initial balance and in a year this is up to $1.25b of revenue. They can show the immediate benefits by populating Newsstand with magazines they couldn't read before subscribing to. Then they get app developers to sign up and publish apps with it with a single click, just turn the system on and it will start generating revenue. Site developers would be harder because they're going to have different ad networks but it's all about ease of integration.
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