Early Thoughts on iPad and iAd Marketing in Ad Age

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I was able to get a few thoughts in Ad Age on what both the iPad and then Apple's iAd platform mean for marketers. You can read the full article there; I&39;m not resposting it here.

A couple other random thoughts relating to it:

I did, as noted in the piece, write the whole article on my iPad. It wasn&39;t that hard. Actually, the hardest part was writing it initially while waiting for takeout at a local Vietnamese restaurant, as people coming in the restaurant wanted to talk to me about it. The food also came way too quickly. Typing felt fairly natural, even if I wouldn&39;t normally use it over a keyboard. I did separately get a wireless keyboard for it, along with a dock, so I have more flexibility. The case I got right from the Apple store doubles as a stand.

One thing the iPad of course doesn&39;t allow for is multitasking. In light of that, when I wrote my first draft of the column in the default iPad email client, I couldn&39;t easily surf the Web and look up stuff – like, oh, the official name of the ad platform. Normally I do a ton of lookups while I write, whether or not it shows in the final product. Fittingly, I technically got the name wrong – it&39;s really iAd, not iAds, as I called it in Ad Age. Hardly a huge deal, but it&39;s funny that my mistake would have been easily corrected if I wrote the post as I wrote all the others.

Also, this went through a few drafts and all the revisions were done on a PC in Word. I&39;m not THAT much of a purist. My colleagues at 360i had some very welcome suggestions for the piece. One idea I had that didn&39;t work was to reframe the Apple vs Google issue as Apple vs Agencies. The problem was I was cramming too many ideas into one: first that the Apple-Google rivalry is overblown (Google could cede the whole app ad market and still be in an amazing position in mobile thanks to a combo of Android proliferation, mobile search, mobile web display, deals with other handsets/carriers, etc), and secondly that the extra hurdles Apple&39;s introducing into advertising makes them antagonize marketers and agencies in a way. There may be something to the idea, but there were too many ideas in a post running a few hundred words, and my colleagues were totally right in strongly encouraging me to shift angles. And really, I didn&39;t need much convincing. They just saved Ad Age&39;s editorial team, among the best I&39;ve worked with, the hassle of reworking the post when they got it.

Again, the full article&39;s at Ad Age: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=143206 .