Apple tunes mobile ads to confront Google
Your financially-oriented friends at Apple are taking steps to place better ads on your phone via their iAd program, and in doing so will come face to face with Google in the lucrative e-advertising industry.
Apple is collecting and using information from its millions of iTunes customers to fine-tune its new iAd engine, making sure that the ads provided are the most relevant to its users. With 150 million users, Apple has a gigantic pool from which to infer the buying habits of key demographics in the marketplace, and a volume of timely information that will allow it to move with the fickle winds of consumer spending. The iAd program officially began last week, featuring ads from companies such as Nissan Motor Co., Unilever NV, JC Penney Co., Best Buy Co. and AT&T Inc.
Advertising industry analysts expect the mobile business to grow to over $1.5 billion in 2013, according to a Business Week article, giving Apple billion of reasons to compete with Google in what has been a primarily Google-driven industry. Most of Googles expertise in the advertising area comes from tracking the search and web-surfing habits of consumers, almost all of whom use Google in one way or another for some portion of their shopping needs, whether to research or to actually make purchases online. Google is, after all, a way that most human beings deal with finding things of all kinds.
The habits of 150 million iTunes buyers do not make as large a database as Google’s, but it is still a substantial storehouse of consumer data. Rachel Pasqua, director of mobile at marketing firm ICrossing, says “Apple knows what you’ve downloaded, how much time you spend interacting with applications and knows even what you’ve downloaded, don’t like and deleted.” Apple hopes to parlay data like that into a business that will rival Google, at least in the mobile marketplace.
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