scurvypirates

Maybe not, but it sure as hell can’t hurt. Check out these staggering numbers regarding the iPad app version of Wired magazine. Not only did they rock out 73,000 downloads in 9 days at $4.99 a pop, they claim it caused a 20% lift in their ad sales. Granted, Uncle Jobs gets a cool 30% of the app revenue, but who gives a shit? It’s the cost of doing business. Read this article about the Wired iPad App.

My day job is working as a producer for a small but high-powered digital shop. We do a lot of contract work for larger agencies, and get to work on some pretty big name brands.  It’s a simple relationship: The clients have the budgets. The agencies have the clients. They are gatekeepers to the cheddar. Unfortunately, this relationship creates a lot of speculative thinking on our part that often results in us doing a lot of work, then scratching our heads thinking WTF? Do people actually get paid to think up this shit? Our good agency clients don’t waste our time and they think things through pretty well, but lately we have been getting a lot of inquiries to ballpark costs on brand iPhone apps. And soon that will extend to iPad apps, and iAds.

How Branded apps and Brand apps are different.

It’s simple. A Brand iPhone app is the result of a brand saying we need an iPhone app for our brand. It’s advertising. It’s a bunch of screen grabs of an iPhone with cute little screens, on page 24 of a pdf the agency is trying to sell to the client as a digital campaign. Page 1 through 23 is all banners. The problem for us as developers is this is just advertising the old way. Branded apps can be different. They can actually have value to the end user, but developed by a brand. If you like this app and use it, just remember it was the nice folks at Brand XX that made it available for you. Right now = way too many Brand apps. They are shallow and do nothing more than make an agency try to justify their digital thinking in terms of media impressions. Yeah we spent $50,000 to bring this to market, and we spent Godknows how much media and PR to promote it, and we got 5000 downloads.

The iAd platform may solve a lot of this. From what little we know about the capabilities of the platform that was announced by Steve Jobs to be rolling out with iPhone 4.0 software later this summer, you can effectively create an App within an App ad unit. My take is this: there will always be advertising polluting our daily lives. It’s a given. As developers, hopefully we’ll see less agencies coming to us with stupid app ideas. Instead they’ll focus on what they know: ads. Only this time, the developer will be in control.

We are ready for this new platform to emerge. Bring it on.