In case you weren’t paying attention (and most likely, you probably weren’t), Apple provided us with an expert lesson in PR 101 today.

You may have heard that Apple recently began selling the new iPhone 4.  It’s done fairly well.

And yet, it hasn’t.  A novel approach to the phone’s antenna was supposed to improve the reception.  Depending on who you ask, it has or it hasn’t, or both.

But this post isn’t about the reception issue.  It’s about an expert example from Apple’s PR team about how to respond to such a situation where as few people as possible will pay attention.

The iPhone 4 launched on June 24th, but some people got their pre-ordered phones a couple of days early.  Almost immediately, reports began to come in about the iPhone Death Grip causing the phone to mysteriously lose signal strength.

Naturally, frustrated iPhone buyers emailed Steve Jobs.  And (almost as naturally) Steve responded.

First, it was a simple response.

Just avoid holding it in that way.

Then, it was boilerplate from Apple PR, guised as a Steve response:

Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

Eventually, it returned to being a non-issue:

There is no reception issue. Stay tuned.

So basically, Steve says there’s an antenna issue.  Or not.  As Fake Steve Jobs puts it:

We call it “clouding.” Right now, for example, we’ve sent out the following messages about iPhone 4 and the antenna issues:

1. All mobile phones have this problem.

2. Our mobile phone does not have this problem.

You see how this works? These two statements cannot both be true.

Yet we’ve said both of them. And now you don’t know what to believe.

Finally, an official response from Apple.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong….Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same— the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped.

Let me see if I’m reading this right.  It’s not an antenna issue, instead it’s a matter of how the iPhone displays the strength of the reception.  Riiiiiiiiight.  So that means this video makes perfect sense:

It’s no surprise then that Apple released this dubious statement addressing the iPhone reception issue on a Friday, especially a Friday before a long holiday weekend.  Because when you send something like this out on a Friday, it has the entire weekend to die down, as opposed to releasing it on a Monday or Tuesday when it has the entire week to get legs.  Add to that the fact that it’s the 4th of July weekend, when many people are out of town and are paying more attention to their families, barbecues and travel plans than the latest Apple news, and this story should be sufficiently quiet by the time we’re all back to real life on Tuesday.

Can Apple's iAd platform really revolutionize mobile advertising?

Came across some required reading from Battelle today on the iAd platform.

iAd was announced at the iPhone 4.0 SDK event and managed to serve as the undercard for such features as multitasking!!! folders!!! unified email inbox!!! – while managing to solicit a collective “huh?” from the marketplace.

The announcement came with all of the requisite buzzwords – revolutionize, magical, emotion, engagement.  But it was difficult not to ask “how?”

Battelle offers the first explanation that surprised me:

Apple is controlling all the creative for iAds (clients will have approvals and submit materials, but Apple alone is doing the actual development – to ensure quality control – and most likely, to maintain the mystery of iAds in general. Classic Jobs).

I hate to state the obvious, but this doesn’t scale.  Or maybe it does.  Maybe that’s the plan to making such a great mobile advertising experience – Apple is going to control the development from start to finish.  Hmm…that’s an interesting thought.  Instead of clients telling their agencies what they want, or agencies telling their clients what they’re going to create (like that’s exciting – more of the same old interactive advertising execution), the baton will be handed off to Steve Jobs & Co. – the wizard who steps out from behind the curtain every six months or so and dazzles us with his latest treasures of desire – to tell other companies how to covey the magic of their brand in ways that only he can.

I’ll be the first to agree that the biggest reason advertising tends to fail is that there’s no editorial control.  Playing the role of curator, publishers create content that attract an audience.  But publishers only fulfill half the role, and fill remnant inventory with ads from anyone who’s willing to be a buyer.  It’s like organizing a museum full of fine art work, then letting the local businesses stop by to slap flyers up on the wall for next to nothing.

Battelle sums it up:

What Apple is selling with iAds is – Apple itself. As well they should. But they are also selling into a marketplace that, for the most part, doesn’t really understand mobile marketing….They don’t realize that most of what Apple is pitching them can be done already.

Which leads me to ask – if they can do it already, what is it about iAd that is going to make them start doing it?  A handful of pretty examples from Apple?  Please.  We’ve seen this narrative before.  The iPhone has been in the market for nearly three years, and most of the marketplace has yet to come up with a product that can compete.  History, I dare say, shall likely repeat itself.

I don’t think people want to buy TV shows.

Instead, I think people want to buy access to TV shows.

Now that bandwidth speeds are finally getting to the point that watching video online can be a good experience, content creators and content providers are looking for ways to get video to consumers online.

It used to be that content creators (networks) needed content providers (cable companies) to help package and distribute the content.

But with the Internet, content creators don’t need the content providers to get their programming out to viewers.  Content creators can post videos online, and visitors can come to their website and watch the video.

The problem right now is fragmentation.  There are too many individual places to get the content from, and nothing that effectively aggregates that content to deliver it to the user at a cost that is palatable for the content creators.

Apple gets half of the equation right.  The iTunes platform acts as a point of defragmentation.  If I’m a user, I don’t want to go to a dozen different sites to watch my shows.  I want to watch them (or at least get access to them) in one place.  That’s what the iTunes store does successfully.

But where Apple gets it wrong is by adopting the music model for TV shows.  It sells shows one at a time, a la carte, like it is a song.

A la carte works for music.  That’s because people want to own songs, so they can listen to them whenever they want and as many times as they want.

But with video, people may want to watch whenever they want, but repetitive viewing is significantly less of an issue.

Yes, there are exceptions.  There are people who want to watch their favorite show ad nauseum.  But that’s not the overwhelming majority of viewers.  Whereas with music, everyone listens to songs multiple times.

A song is easily digestible.  It doesn’t requite a big time commitment.  You can listen to your favorite song in just a few minutes.  Music is passive.  You throw it on, and listen to it in the background.

TV isn’t passive.  Sure, you can turn the TV on and just listen to it passively while washing dishes.  But owning a TV show isn’t really important in that equation, the way it is important for music.  For music, you want to own the song because you like a certain style of music and want the freedom to listen to that, even if it’s in the background, whenever you want.

So the next step is easy to identify, but hard to execute.  Essentially, it’s about finding a pricing model that will include access to a vast array of content, for a price that is reasonable to consumers and satisfying to content creators.  The technology is the easy part.  It’s the dealmaking that will be difficult.

The iPad doesn't have to do as much as a laptop. It just as to do as much as people need it to do.

It’s no secret that I like Apple.

I like the simplicity.  The design.  How everything is intuitive.

No doubt, there was a lot of skepticism when Apple announced the much anticipated iPad.  No Flash.  No multitasking.  No keyboard.  Simply put, it didn’t live up to expectations.

Know what?  Sounds just like the iPhone.  And I would argue many of the same reasons the iPhone was successful will be why the iPad will be successful.

First, the iPad is simple.  Those who are in the tech community take computer competency for granted.

The fact is, a lot of people still don’t get computers.  How many of your parents could set up an email client?  How about the WiFi in their home with networked printing?  Hell, most people don’t know how to reliably adjust the margins in Word.

There seems to be this mentality that the iPad is somehow deficient because it runs iPhone apps as opposed to full size Mac OS X apps.  Which is a valid argument if we say that more is better.  But more isn’t always better.  More is just more.

I remember when I was using Quicken to try to manage my finances.  It was an absolute nightmare.  Why?  Was it because there was some feature that Quicken didn’t have that I really needed?  Nope.  Quite the opposite.  It gave me more than I needed.  I just got lost in the thing.

People don’t need to get lost.  They need the basics.  There’s not many day-to-day tasks that I can’t do on my phone.  Search for an address?  Check.  Pay my bills?  Yep.  Check email, read the news, get the weather?  Yes, yes and yes.  I actually prefer to do email on my phone than on my computer.  It’s faster and easier.  And for 90% of people, that’s what they need.  They don’t need to run Photoshop, develop a website, or make a pivot table.  They just need the basics.

Second, the iPad is always connected to the web (well, the 3G iPads are).  The impact of this has certainly been overlooked by many.  Is your laptop always connected to the web?  On the train, in the car, at the airport terminal?  Unless you have one of those mobile broadband cards, the answer is probably no.

Think about what it’s like to constantly have information at your fingertips.  Compare that to before you had a smartphone, when getting lost meant you had to bring out a map and waiting anxiously for that important email meant you had to be at home to receive it.  If you had to choose between an always-on internet connection or the ability to do advanced spreadsheet functions, I’d be willing to guess you’d pick the connection (and apparently with iWork, you could do the spreadsheet stuff, too).

Finally, I think one of the big reasons the iPad will win is because Apple had the discipline to say no.  To say no to Flash.  To say no to multitasking.  One of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes highlights this:

It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

I’ll probably get a lot of flack for this, but Flash isn’t important.  I know 75% of online video uses Flash.  I also know that it’s not that hard to port Flash videos over to another format.  It’s way too resource-intensive for things that don’t need to be that bloated.  Besides, Flash would be an awful  user experience on the iPad.  Right now, Flash interfaces are designed for something the size of the mouse pointer, not the much larger size of your finger.  That isn’t a user experience I want.

As for multitasking, I’m on the fence here.  I understand that it doesn’t have multitasking because that leads to more crashes.  And frankly, I’ve had periods where my iPhone apps crash much too frequently.  So I realize I wouldn’t want more of that.  Still, when you’re surfing the web, it would be nice to be able to listen to Pandora at the same time.  Would multitasking be nice?  Yes, as long as it was relatively crash-free.  But it’s not critical for me.  And I’m guessing it’s not critical for most people.

I’m not blind to the flaws.  As opposed to the iPhone, which served as a replacement for existing cell phones that were absolutely awful, and the iPod, which replaced CD players that were bulky and required that you carry around a huge book of CDs, the iPad doesn’t replace anything.  Most people don’t have netbooks, but everyone had a cell phone before the iPhone.  Everyone had a CD player.  Those were easy upgrades to understand.

When I hear criticism of the iPad, I can’t help but remember the criticisms of the iPhone and think about how far the iPhone has come.  In the beginning, the iPhone was on a slower EDGE connection with no MMS, no copy/paste, no application development platform.  It was, in many ways, simple and basic.  It’s still simple today, but with 3G, MMS, and thousands of apps, it’s not basic.

The iPad will be the same way.  It’s basic right now, because developers have not been building applications for a 10 inch screen.  That will change, and I expect that developers will slowly unlock the full potential of a large, fast touchscreen device.  Apple has shown a propensity to release very focused, basic products and iterate on them.  The iPod and iPhone are the exemplars for this philosophy.  The iPad will follow that same model.

Apple succeeds by making simple products that often do less, but do enough and do it better.  That’s the first half.  The second half of the success equation is creating products that replace something consumers already have.

Half of the Apple success equation is present in the iPad.  Logical replaceability, however, isn’t as clear.  Will people ditch a laptop for a more basic device?  The answer to that question will be predicated not on whether the iPad will do as much as a laptop.  Rather, the answer will lie in whether the iPad will do as much as people need it to do.  Which, to be sure, is a very different standard.

I just ran across this article from Time titled “What Will the World Do with More Search Engines?“  My first reaction and answer to this question was “it will ignore them,” and for actual search engines, I think that is true.  User habits have already been ingrained, and chiseling away at market share is no small task, as Yahoo! and MSN can attest.

However, CNN (and now Time) have recently run articles regarding new “search engines” that have come to market, no doubt influenced by the recent public launch of highly-publicized (and frankly somewhat disappointing in scope) Wolfram Alpha, which isn’t so much a search engine as much as it is a computational engine.

The Time article isn’t so much about what the world is going to do with more search engines, as much as it identifies how search has become an innovator’s dilemma.  Much in the way Clayton Christensen explained in his seminal book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” how the semiconductor chip industry saw improvements in technology that surpassed the needs of the existing market, the Time article exhibits how the capabilities of search engines have begun to exceed the needs of the existing search market.

Search engines continue to add features, whether it is Google, Yahoo, MSN, or otherwise.  However, for most queries, a user can find the answer they are looking for from any of the major engines.  No single engine holds a meaningful and distinctive feature that places it head and shoulders above it’s competitors when it comes to organic search.  As Time puts it:

“The trouble with the search-engine business is that its future may have almost nothing to do with whether search results get more accurate. Google’s information is already more than adequate for the huge majority of people who want to find information online. At some point, and that point has probably been reached, people cannot tell the difference between flying in an airplane that is at 32,000 feet and one that is flying 1,000 feet higher. The change in perspective means nothing to them. All they know is that they are as high as they have to be to get where they are going.”

In a classic innovator’s dilemma, this would mean that search technology should be able to serve other markets.  I think in many ways, this has already started to manifest.  Google created Gmail to increase the real estate in which it could deliver targeted advertising, but through it’s search technology brought a superior cloud email system to market.  And it is probably no coincidence that Apple brought a superior PC search feature to it’s OS X operating system in Spotlight while Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been on the board of directors.

Meanwhile, competition comes from downstream, not upstream.  Wolfram Alpha, in my opinion, doesn’t compete in quite the same way as Google, and I anticipate this will create problems for Wolfram Alpha when it comes to monetization.  Google is an intermediary, in that users come to Google to find information, and to be taken to that page on the web.  Wolfram Alpha, meanwhile, seeks to aggregate information from various sources on the web, and present them to the user in concert, on the Wolfram Alpha site.  So Wolfram Alpha’s goal is not to be an intermediary, it is to be a destination that pulls information from a backend, in this case the backend is the world wide web.

But if there is a paradigm shift in the way that people seek information, and how they want that information presented to them, then Wolfram Alpha can be a real threat to Google.  Google is pushing forth an agenda of getting webmasters to contextualize the information on their sites in a standardized way through their recent announcement of Rich Snippets.  This will help all search engines, and even non-search-related technologies on the web, not just Google.  If another company is able to capitalize on the proliferation of this added semantic markup, Google could find itself entering a very real competitive battle.

Much has been said about the opportunities that Internet-enabled mobile phones and so-called smart phones bring to advertisers.

While I agree that the next 3-5 years will bring about significant innovation with regard to mobile advertising, current mobile-based advertising has shown a lack of effective execution.  Granted, my view is biased toward advertising on the iPhone, simply because the iPhone is the device that I use on a daily basis.  However, along with the Blackberry, the iPhone is certainly the most sophisticated and advanced cell phone available, and should offer a good case study of advertising execution.

Below, I offer an analysis of various advertising on iPhone apps that I use daily.  I have also given each ad a letter grade.  To determine the grade, I considered the the advertisement itself (i.e. the banner or text ad, whether it had a call to action, placement), the landing page after tapping on the ad (usability on a mobile device, messaging) and whether or not the ad was tracking a conversion, thereby delivering the ability to track a true ROI for the campaign.

Weather Channel

The Weather Channel application places a small advertisement at the top of the screen.  The current advertiser when I pulled my screenshots was Zyrtec.

Zyrtec ad on Weather Channel application.

The drop-down ad is actually pretty good.  The unopened ad says “The fastest 24-hour OTC allergy relief.”  There is not a call to action, but the ad is simple and easy to read.

When I tap on the banner, the offer drops down.  There is a clear image of the Zyrtec product and a very clear message.  So far, so good.  However, the second screen fails to execute well for a mobile device.

After I tap on the expanded offer, I am redirected to what appears to be an internal page from the regular Zyrtec site.  The page has extremely small type.  While I can zoom in on the text, it would be better to have a landing page that is optimized for a mobile device.

Once I zoom in, I can see that there is a “Download PDF” link to redeem a refund if I was not satisfied with the product.  When I tap on the link, nothing happens.  Why would the advertiser require that the user download a file if they are on a mobile handset?  It just doesn’t make any sense.  It would have made better sense if the user could enter their email address and receive the necessary file in an email that they could print off later on.  While conversion tracking may be implemented on the “Download PDF” link, it is irrelevant because it is not possible to download, let alone print, the form to be sent in.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: D-

New York Times

Similar to the Weather Channel application, the New York Times hase an advertisement on the home page of the app.  While the New York Times has featured various different advertisers in it’s in-app advertising, they also fill those advertising spots with ads for their own content and features.  This was the case when I reviewed their advertising execution.

New York Times mobile advertisement

The NY Times runs ads on the bottom of the screen, as opposed to the Weather Channel which ran its ad on the top.  The landing domain m.nytimes.com is listed in the ad, along with clear messaging “Find movie showtimes.”

New York Times landing page

The landing page is optimized for a mobile device and lists current movies.  From there, the user can view showtimes or reviews from the New York Times.  The user can easily get the information they are looking for on this well optimized mobile page.  The conversion metric here may simply be click-throughs, however it is feasible that the NY Times is tracking clicks through to reviews and/or showtimes.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: A

Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune iPhone-optimized site uses Google AdSense to serve advertising on the site.  The Tribune runs AdSense on the article pages of its iPhone site.  The Trib also runs small banner ads on the homepage of the site.  However, like the NY Times, the Chicago Tribune was advertising its own content, so I opted instead to take a look at the AdSense.

AdSense on Chicago Tribune

The ads on the Tribune’s iPhone site are located below the article.  It seems very likely that many users would finish reading the article and neglect to even look at the ads.  But, as Internet-marketers know, we don’t need many users clicking on the ads.  If we have enough traffic on the site, we just need a small percentage of the traffic clicking on ads, and that makes the system work.

University of Phoenix ad

I tapped on an ad for what appears to be a University of Phoenix affiliate site.  The landing page does not appear to be optimized for a mobile phone, however the page is very simple and actually works quite well as a mobile landing page.  The first page captures information such as citizenship status, prior level of education completed and email address.  Then, after tapping on the continue button, the user can submit additional information such as address, phone number, and whether or not they want a University of Phoenix representative to contect them.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: B+

ESPN

The ESPN iPhone optimized site serves ads on the top of the site, above all of the content.  It is similar to the Weather Channel and the New York Times in that it is analogous to what we think of as a traditional banner ad.

Knight ad on ESPN iPhone site

In this case, the ad includes the company name, a call to action and a landing page domain.  However, there is no indication of what is being advertised.  I am not familiar with Knight, and to be honest I have absolutely no clue what they are advertising.  I’m not sure if it’s software or an ISP or financial services or what.  With all of the other ads, I had at least a decent idea of what the advertisement was trying to push.

Knight ESPN iPhone ad landing page

After tapping on the banner ad, I found that the landing page was actually on the ESPN.com mobile site and not on an external site.  The landing page simply has a small amount of text from the advertiser and a URL.  However, the URL for www.knight.com is not clickable.  Despite trying to touch the URL to go to Knight.com, I was not able to be taken anywhere on the Knight website.  While the advertiser may be able to track click-throughs, they are not capturing visitor information to record any type of conversion.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: D

Conclusion

Based on the four mobile advertisements reviewed, it appears that the biggest area of improvement for mobile advertisers is in the area of mobile usability.  Two of the four ads sent users to non-mobile  optimized landing pages, and another sent users to a page with the advertiser URL that couldn’t be clicked on.  Many of the advertisers were able to strike a good balance between short messaging and clear phrasing letting the user know what is being advertised.  Surprisingly, but thankfully, conversion tracking seems to be something that most of the advertisers had the capability of tracking.  While mobile advertising is certainly progressing, advertisers need to consider and account for the mobile medium when creating ads, as opposed to retro-fitting existing assets that are better suited for a user on a fully functional computer.

I love this article on TechRadar about how Apple has established its philosophy for creating superior user interface.

Earlier this week, I noticed a Google advertisement on the Red Line.  The ad featured the iconic Google Maps pin, and said that Google now has public transportation directions in Google Maps.

About six months ago I started using the Nike+ system.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Nike+, it’s basically a digitally integrated training system to help you track all of your runs.

Apparently Samsung has released an iPhone clone, also being called the SCH-W420 AnyCall Haptic.  WTF?  Here’s a thought, make the name something people can actually pronounce.  For instance, just call it the Haptic and drop the SCH-W420 mumbo-jumbo.  This is coming from the same folks who brought this to market.  Wow.  ET phone home.