Apple is reportedly easing some of its policies around iAd to spark interest and counter Google’s mobile ad control. Sources divulged Monday night to the Wall Street Journal that the minimum ad buy was dropping beyond earlier cuts to $400,000, less than half the million-dollar original baseline. Apple was also veering from the original plan, which charged a substantial amount for every ad click, to a believed $10 for every 1,000 views and what’s implied is a lower $2 for every click.
More advanced ads, such as video ads, would carry a higher rate.
The company was also hoping to genuinely understand the advertising world, the tipsters said, and had started up a training campaign with its media buyer OMD. In return for a tour of Apple’s 1 Infinite Loop campus, marketers from Clorox, JC Penney, and Pepsi helped teach advertising elements. A follow-up visit would come in February.
Apple is reportedly fairing relatively well in the mobile ad space, claiming an estimated 15 percent of the mobile ad market in 2011, but it will have fallen from 19 percent in 2010 and would be both behind Google’s AdMob and Millennial Media. AdMob asks between $4 to $12 for every 1,000 views, making it potentially cheaper to use for smaller clients.
The iPhone designer might have an advantage if lower ad rates and more cooperative work pay off. Unilever notes that engagement is much higher with iAd than AdMob, where a viewer sees and interacts with ads for about 68 seconds on average. Google still focuses primarily on its text ads and limited image ads where iAds are always HTML5-based spots that usually have animation and sometimes video.
