Much mobile advertising news in the last two years or so has been dominated by iPhone and understandably so. Probably more than any other single factor, it's been responsible for marketers and agencies understanding the potential power of the mobile channel for the first time, primarily because they have one themselves. At last, their own personal experience married up with what had been happening on the street for a while.
But iPhone's dominance in the hearts and minds of mobile advertisers might be about to be threatened by a new player in the market - Google's Android.
The iPhone has tight control over their product, from software and hardware design to manufacturing and negotiating distribution. Android has taken a very different approach of developing an Open Source operating system and letting it out into the wild. What that means in practical terms is that they need to persuade other branded phone manufacturers like Motorola or Samsung to integrate their software into a new generation of phones and then allow these partners to control manufacture and distribution. In theory, this approach will enable them to leverage these other giant companies' power and resources to potentially leapfrog other competitors, ranging from iPhone through to Nokia and their Open Source operating system, Symbian. The big disadvantage is that Google pretty much hand over control of the product hardware, meaning that even if their software is Rolls-Royce standard, it still might end up powering a 1975 Ford Cortina. In a market where looks are an important purchase consideration, this could be something of a problem.
What do we know about Android so far? Despite a pretty lacklustre handset range (perhaps we're talking a Mondeo to iPhone's BMW in terms of looks), it's clear that the software is powerful and once cool phones are in production, it's going to have some success. I'm not going to speculate if it's going to be as big as iPhone, but it's already clear that it's going to be an important channel for mobile advertising.
Every month, AdMob (my employer, just to be clear) produces a free Metrics report that we share with anyone who might be interested. You can see the latest copy here, but one of the trends we track is the type of operating systems that we serve our ads in. To be clear about our methodology, we serve about 10 billion ads every month to mobile web publishers and app developers globally. This means that we can't measure market share, but we can track handsets that are used more than they should be, to view mobile web pages and download and use apps. We noticed very early on that iPhone was getting a disproportionate amount of share when measured like this and history is being repeated with Android.
What's also great for mobile advertisers is that Android and iPhone both offer much more creative advertising formats and that their ease of use generally mean more interaction and higher click-through-rates. Consumers are engaging with marketers via the mobile channel in very large numbers and that trend is going to speed up with more Android handsets in the market.
Does the arrival of Andoid complicate things for mobile advertisers? Certainly not if you just want to run ads on the mobile web or in-apps - though inventory in apps might still be a little scarce compared to iPhone. In fact, you wouldn't even notice that Android had been included in your buy, from a purely operational standpoint. The main complication would be if you wish to transfer your iPhone App over the Android platform too - this will require a little adaption by the developer. The numbers of Andoid apps available are still relatively small, certainly compared to the 100,000 iPhone Apps, but then competition to attract downloads is also small, so now might be a good time to make the leap.
Like mobile advertising, Android is here to stay, is going to be growing quickly and will be dominating mobile marketing chatter for a while. Brands who pride themselves on being innovators should be taking a look at it right now.
