TOOLS : In the i of the beholder By Simon Hendery Apple Inc’s publicity machine is a wondrous thing. CEO Steve Jobs can announce a much-as-expected new tablet computer with an underwhelming and somewhat predictable name – the iPad – and the world’s media still react with rabid hysteria.
Sure, the device looks nice, but is it really going to change the world, redefining the advertising paradigm along the way?
The January launch of the iPad made it particularly easy for digital media maestros to do what they do early every year: Declare that two-thousand-and-x will be the year when mobile marketing really takes off.
Britain’s The Independent proffered up this scenario as an example of how the new device is about to change the game: “Imagine watching, say, an episode of Mad Men on your iPad, touching the screen when you see a jacket you like, and immediately being able to order it via an online store. At a stroke, product placement becomes a measurable, transactionable and immensely more interesting proposition for advertisers and content creators alike.”
There’s actually nothing uniquely iPad-ish about that example. Mobile/online/interactive marketing has been a measurable, transactionable, and – at least arguably – interesting medium for quite a while now.
The conclusion many pundits are reaching, however, is that the new Apple gizmo, with its 10-inch touchscreen, will revolutionise the interactive medium in the same way the company transformed the computer market with the Macintosh and mainstreamed music downloading with the iPod.
Ovum analyst Adrian Drury goes as far as to call Apple’s tablet play the miracle the stricken media industry has been looking for.
Drury predicts the practice of publishers pushing more content behind pay-walls will become a key industry issue this year. He doubts that the traditional media’s attempts to reverse a decade-old business model based around providing free content, by suddenly asking consumers to pay for it, will prove successful. That is, unless Apple can help make the new model work.
“Apple has demonstrated for the music industry that the combination of a strong media retail platform with a consistent user experience across multiple, integrated devices can draw consumers away from free, but less elegant, consumption models,” Drury says.
“The news industry will be hoping that Apple can deliver a similar experience in 2010. If it fails to deliver, radical restructuring of the news media supply chain will be needed.”
While Jobs hasn’t exactly promised to save the media industry with the iPad, he certainly didn’t hold back when it came to articulating his lofty expectations for the device at its super-hyped San Francisco launch event, saying it would trump Amazon’s ebook reader, Kindle.
“Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle. We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little further,” he said.
But some commentators don’t believe Apple has won the all-important electronic book, magazine and newspaper reading platform war quite yet.
“As it stands, a quick, well-structured response from Amazon in the next version of Kindle could easily be a contender here,” was the reaction of James McQuivey, a Forrester Research analyst.
“That’s why I say that the iPad is priced lower than expected, because it is less revolutionary than expected.”
www.twitter.com/SimonHendery simon@businesswriter.co.nz
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