Novelty or not, I’m into the iPad — hook, line, and sinker

From Amanda Murphy, Senior Copywriter, Palio

Erin Rossi, Palio Art Director extraordinaire, and I recently attended a conference sponsored by The Big Money: Untethered 2010: Profitable Media in the Tablet Era, where some pretty prominent folks from companies like Condé Nast Digital, Sony, HealthCentral, Zagat Survey, Simon & Schuster, Google, Razorfish, and one of the guys responsible for a little campaign known as Apple “1984” sat on stage and spewed their feelings about the iPad and its potential effect on their business. Feelings that left it obvious as to who thinks the iPad is just another me-too device and who thinks it’s the sliced bread, peanut butter, AND jelly all rolled into one sparkling, shiny package.

All in all, the content was noteworthy. The speakers were impressive. The new Blio software for e-readers was snazzy. The mini cupcakes were mini.

But the most fascinating point to me was this quote from Shiv Singh, Vice President of Razorfish (forgive me if I butcher this, Shiv. I’m not a journalist): “The average time a user spent on the GQ iPad app was 62 minutes.” Wow. 62 minutes? And just the other day, I read on Adrants that ads on the iPad perform 6 times better than on a desktop. Double wow. In advertising, where you’re thrilled if a user spends more than a few seconds on your site, or you somehow achieve a 2% click-through rate from e-mail, this is big. Maybe the reason for these statistics is due to the novelty of the iPad, but methinks it’s much more.

Imagine an app created solely with your client’s brand and target in mind. Let’s take diabetes for example. With one app, patients could monitor blood sugar levels, keep track of their eating and exercise, set up reminders to take their medication, learn all about the product being promoted, etc. Sound just like a regular ol’ Web site? Re-read that GQ statistic, my friend, and think again.

Or, what if you could score for your client a single-sponsorship on an app relevant to their brand? Wait. Forget single-sponsorship, any amount of advertising you can land where users are spending an hour plus with their eyes and fingertips glued to the iPad just tapping and browsing and interacting is mind blowing.

This is incredibly exciting news for advertisers, because it means we get to experiment with the latest and greatest whiz bang device and expand our capabilities to gain new clients. (And ideally, it also means we get to play with the devices that create the whiz bang.) But, advertisers, this is equally exciting news for you. It means the chances for your ad to be not only read but acted upon, increase exponentially—by 6 times, to be exact-ish.

So, yeah, the iPad really is changing everything from turning flat content into a truly dynamic, user experience to showing us marketers how to take advantage of that content without crowding the marketplace.

Now that we’ve got the question of making media on a tablet more profitable all figured out, the only thing left to learn is just how this iAds works.