Adobe and Apple: The Saber-Rattling Is Getting Loud in Here, and Why You Should Care

The theatre of Rich Advertising got really interesting last week when Apple announced that applications to be used on the upcoming iPhone 4.0 OS have to be written in a handful of native languages, without an adapter or translation layer.

As advertising winds itself into the fabric of web applets and applications and away from traditional paid display advertising, your device will determine a lot of what you will see. And what your customers will see. Or perhaps more importantly, what they won’t see.

To bring you up to speed on the landscape:

• The iPhone itself accounts for more than 50% of all Smartphone advertising traffic.
• Traditional Search advertising as a percentage of overall spend is on the decline.
• Display and Banner traffic is trending up.
• Apple has announced its own in-house advertising network, iAd, to launch in 2010, using the iPad as its initial base.
• Forrester estimates that mobile marketing will grow by over 1 billion dollars before the end of 2014.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, recently did his own math on Ad Age and the numbers get pretty crazy, pretty fast: 1 ad every 3 minutes for an average user (spending 30 minutes in apps each day) comes to 1 billion impressions per day just on iPhones.

Clearly, if you’re involved with the wrong developer, or in the wrong platform, you could find yourself on the outside looking in. So the obvious question you’re asking, “why not just develop rich ads and apps that don’t involve Flash?” Well for starters Flash is the most pervasive application in the web browsing world to date. John Dowdle of Macromedia put it fairly succinctly:

“…the day DoubleClick started serving SWF ads marked the day that Macromedia Flash changed from “just another web technology” to a standard part of the web experience. No other cross-browser technology has reached such wide consumer support…”

If you’re going to pay designers and developers a tidy sum to create intriguing content, questions abound as to why Apple wouldn’t allow those designers and developers to start on a platform that’s integrated into the browser already.

Also affected by the decision, larger content providers such as Condé Nast have spent considerable amounts of time and money to develop digital versions of their magazines that push the boundary of what we know as “digital content.” And who did CN seek out to develop that magazine format? Adobe, who’s AIR platform will not work under the new rules set down by Apple.

Where it all ends is anybody’s guess, and there are larger parts of the relationship at stake. This arena is just one of several that Adobe and Apple interact in. But we’ll be watching it with more than just passing interest.