“For marketers … this is actually turning out, in my view, to be an ad-serving machine”
- Kostas Mallios, Microsoft’s general manager for Strategy and Business Development
Back in April, when Apple announced iAd as one of it’s “tent poles” of iOS4, I was pretty ready to just hold for Windows Mobile 7 and see how that looked. I’d had some time to mess with my sisters Zune HD and between that experience, and some of the Win 7 demos I’d seen, I was thinking maybe it was time to make a switch.
Not so much.
Of all the ways Microsoft could have gone after the iPhone - the hardware, the ecosystem, any of it - they pick iAd? The new platform is going by the name Toast for now and the goal is, as stated above, to turn their phones into “an ad-serving machine.” Good lord.
Like Apple, Microsoft is trying to spin this as a feature:
“For consumers, what this means is basically seamless experiences, seamless social connectivity”
Uh, what? On what planet is advertising a seamless, social experience? Advertising by its nature is about disrupting the users experience. It’s about taking them out of whatever they’re doing and saying “hey! look over here!”
What really takes this platform over the top for me is that while iAd is limited to applications, Toast runs in the main OS, serving ads right to the home screen of your phone.
I’m a bit a stuck record on this, but since we’re all here I’ll say it again: display advertising is an artifact of the print and broadcast worlds. It ignores all the best aspects of the web in exchange for showcasing its most boring. Worse, its left huge sections of the digital content economy in shambles, resulting stupid pagination schemes, and user hostile page layouts all designed to squeeze in one more ad. It’s bizarre to me that here on the cusp what should be the next wave of connected systems two companies that should be leading the charge are playing last decades game. I was genuinely hoping Microsoft would come into the mobile space with Win 7 and give Apple something to think about. But if this is how they’re going to do it, what’s the point?
