iAD: Apple tries to give value to mobile advertising

Apple's mobile advertising platform, iAd is only at an early stage of its development. They recently release a video of their first customer case with Nissan.

The results are quite promising, since they succeed to gain a lot of attention to the brand. Click through rates are said to be 5 time higher on iAd than on a regular browser. The average interaction lasted about 90 seconds. Quite a good start!

But to achieve these results, the advertiser has to deal with Apple's standards. Sure the results are great as you'll see in the video, but it increases the delay to set up a campaign (up to 10 weeks!). Plus not every advertiser could stand it till the end.

Google Adwords: Fight for your brand

Since September 14th, Google has changed its brand protection policy in Europe. Now you can bid on a brand you don't own.

This could lead to insane behavior. If Pepsi want to steal customer away from Coca-Cola, they can just bid a high price on the words "Coke" or "Coca-Cola"... Of course you don't want your customers to receive deceiving results as they google your name. So you'll have to bid high prices too.

As a result prices for brands will probably increase. Great move from Google. Advertisers are upset but they have no other choice. They can try to go on court, but I doubt they'll win their case.

This move could change the way advertisers use Adwords. I guess smart and malicious Adwords users could definitely turn the game to their advantage.

Google Instant: Search before you type

Google's latest innovation is called Google instant. If you go on Google's home page and start typing your query, you'll find your results instantly.

Google is going faster and faster. It makes Internet a better place. Even if there's no disruption here, it could still allow Google to keep it domination in Search.

Impressive... Maybe it will make people get used to real time response (already used in Google docs and Google Wave).

Gmail priority inbox

After the failure of Google Wave, Google is still trying to find a way to improve on-line communication. They understood that emails are too used to be replaced. Therefore they have to focus on their great tool Gmail in order to be successful.

Gmail is already a great tool for emails. Its core advantage is to enable the user to follow their emails by threads. This means that if there are answers to a mail, you can easily read the whole conversation.

Yet it still very easy to get overwhelmed by an increasing number of received emails. That's why Google has decided to organize them in two categories according to their importance.