It’s only days before Apple’s iPad is scheduled to hit store shelves, and the excitement for the April 3 launch is mounting. Advertisers have cautiously tested out mobile marketing and ads over the past half decade, but the iPad, for one reason or another, has given many ad buyers the green light for mobile advertising.
According to a NY Times post earlier this week, big-name advertisers have already bought ad space on the iPad. Unilever, Toyota Motor, Korean Air and Fidelity have booked space on the New York Times’s iPad application, and Chase Sapphire already purchased all of their advertising units for two months starting at the iPad’s launch date. FedEx bought ad space from Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.
iPad advertisements on print publishers’ applications cost $75,000 to $300,000 for a few months with some exclusivity, Phuc Truong, managing director of Havas Digital’s Mobext US, told the NY Times. Early excitement is due, in a large part, to tapping into the Apple buzz, which includes having advertisements show up in all Apple in-store demos of the product. Time is charging $200,000 for a single spot in its first eight issues designed for the iPad. The Wall Street Journal has four-month deals with several companies that cost $400,000.
However, the pricing may come down as the buzz wears off. For advertisers, measurement of success will be necessary to determine how much these ads are actually worth over the long run. “We’ve got to figure out what the measurements are,” Mark Ford, president of the Time Inc. News Group, told the New York Times. “It’s not how you measure print, it’s not, certainly, how you measure digital. It’s going to be different.”
