January 10th, 2010
Who Says TV’s Dead? aka Leveraging Whatever Platform You’ve Got
Look at that image.
‘iPhone apps from TV Ads’
‘iPod touch games from TV Ads’
What better way for Apple to mitigate it’s marketing spend on TV and leverage where they’re spending their money. That image appears inside iTunes and is very nearly as powerful a marketing platform as that other bit of 2010 ubiquity – the google home page. Oh, and lo and behold, Google is doing the same thing with their little ad on the google search page for the Nexus One.
What’s going on here? Not only are Google and Apple engaged in a death-match with respect to how we spend our digital dollars but they are both becoming marketing platforms above and beyond their more traditional roles as search leader and fanboy fetishist plaything. It will be a long time, if ever, before you see a non-Google product on the Google home page but their willingness to pimp their own phone shows they have no qualms about using that giant leverage for whatever purpose they deem appropriate. And then there’s this Apple ad within iTunes touting for all those app and games developers – “If you catch our eye – look at all this value we’ll give you.” It’s a pretty powerful proposition and one that will only increase the value that Apple
So think about this. Google is so far beyond being a ’search engine’ as it multiplies the business it’s in – the multiplier effect is making it indispensable to everyone and everything. And then there’s Apple with this cute little ad inside iTunes. They are literally paying themselves. They place the ad on TV. You watch the Ad. You buy Apps based on the Ad and Apple gets a cut of the revenue when the developers sell the App. They also increase their power in the marketplace because they are able to show how if your App can make the cut you get money, fame and recognition. It’s not quite a virtuous circle – but it’s certainly a model sure to yield profits for those participating in the ecosystem.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.