Blog: What the Tron iAd Means for the Future of Tablet Advertising

When Apple introduced its iAd platform back in April, it promised to raise the bar for rich media mobile display advertising. To show off the platform’s capabilities, Apple demonstrated an ad for Disney’s “Toy Story 3,” complete with games, video and in-ad purchasing. So with iAd now poised to finally reach the iPad, it seems fitting that Apple would once again turn to Disney to debut the larger-format ads on its larger-format device.

Because iAd won’t officially roll out for the iPad until early next year, Disney’s “Tron Legacy” iAd has the limelight all to itself, just in time for its blockbuster release on Dec. 17.

The ad itself, activated from a typical iAd banner, is visually stunning. Like its “Toy Story 3? predecessor, it comes complete with trailers, a theater locator and character profiles as well as a helpful explanation of the film’s convoluted plot (helpful for those who cannot remember back to or did not see the original “Tron” of 1982). The ad also enables viewers to purchase the movie’s soundtrack from iTunes without leaving the ad.

It’s a tour de force, and although by no means the first interactive rich media ad for the iPad, it is nonetheless an impressive harbinger of what is to come in terms of tablet advertising. Moreover, the “Tron Legacy” iAd is very much in line with a trend I noted in a previous post, which is, the combined effect of bigger screens and richer, more engaging ads, including video, is slowly changing consumer attitudes toward advertising on mobile devices.

Nielsen’s research among connected device owners suggests that iPad owners are more receptive to ads than other mobile device owners, particularly when the ads contain video and other interactive features. These findings square with the general purpose of the device. After all, the iPad shines when it comes to video and multi-media consumption.

But even if mobile device users are becoming more receptive to advertising, how much time they are willing to devote to viewing ads is still an open question, especially when much of the more useful content, such as trailers and showtimes, are readily accessible through other means. To the extent that brands that have built iAds have been willing to comment on the record, they have indicated satisfaction with metrics such as dwell times and interaction rates.

Apple has made no secret of the fact that it expects mobile users to reach content such as movie trailers through applications, including in-app advertising, rather than search engines, so it may be a question of finding the right balance between the richness and layers of the ads and the amount of time marketers demand from their target audience. At the very least, if some early reviews are to be believed, the “Tron Legacy” iAd might very well be more entertaining than the film itself.

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Blog: Can RIM Satisfy Both Consumers and the Enterprise with Its Tablet?

Thanks in large part to the success of iPad, 2010 is shaping up to be the year of the tablet. Apple succeeded in resurrecting a moribund form factor and endowing it with new life and a broader appeal. Much of that appeal stems from familiarity: the iPad is not only immediately recognizable to the millions of iPhone and iPod users but also draws from the same pool of content (music, games, video, apps) on which owners of other Apple products have come to rely.

The next 12 months will see a raft of tablet introductions as other manufacturers rush to play catch-up with Apple and capture a piece of this emerging market. For the most part, the tablet market is likely to emerge as another battleground in the increasingly fierce mobile OS war between Apple and Google. As in the smartphone market, Apple has some advantage because the iTunes and App stores have a larger pool of content than Android Market, but the increasing scale of Android devices is helping giving the Android content marketplace greater appeal.

A wild card in the tablet market is BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM). Today it introduced the PlayBook, a tablet running on a new OS derived from QNX, the software company RIM acquired from Harman International in April (at the time, the acquisition seemed to herald a push into the automotive telematics space).

As with its smartphones, RIM faces unique challenges as it prepares to enter the tablet market. Although BlackBerry holds the largest share of the US smartphone market, and its devices often rank among the top 10 best-selling phones (meaning that many consumers are buying them), RIM is nonetheless associated with the enterprise. As such, it faces the perennial issue of how to balance the needs of its core business customers with the differing demands of its consumer audience.

In a recent blog post, AMD’s Pat Moorhead shared his “wish list” of features he’d like to see in a RIM tablet. It includes access to enterprise applications (network and SharePoint access, printing to networked computers, use of corporate web apps such as budgeting and expenses  and BlackBerry apps such as e-mail, calendar and address book), video conferencing and peer-to-peer resource sharing with BlackBerry smartphones for things like phone calls and wireless tethering.

Some of these features would undoubtedly serve consumer tablet use as well, but would also edge the tablet closer to a computing device rather than a portable entertainment and media consumption device. There’s nothing wrong with that approach per se. In fact, unlike the smartphone market, where device size and specs are fairly well established, tablet manufacturers have more latitude to experiment with different screen sizes and device features. Some tablets will be more smartphone-like while others will be more computer-like.

But satisfying both sets of demands equally well is difficult – a lesson RIM has learned with the latest BlackBerry smartphones.  A new and untested OS and RIM’s somewhat spotty history with touchscreen user interfaces represent additional hurdles. Appealing entertainment features combined with a robust enterprise tool set could make for a crossover hit, but there are still many question marks.

UPDATE: PlayBook is the official name of RIM’s new tablet. Full specs available here. As expected, the PlayBook attempts to satisfy both constituencies, but will enterprise customers be tempted to “Play” along or throw out the PlayBook? The feature set says yes, but the name says no.

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