• by Brad Heidemann , April 22, 2010

As technologist and marketer, I often see intersections that appear to break new ground and those that are repeating patterns that are already well understood. With the iPad, Apple seems to be pulling from the Microsoft playbook by controlling the channels of distribution, albeit over a flexible device and the cloud. Instead of operating systems and hardware, Apple has clearly landed on the side of digital content and advertising on a framework that encourages the active participation of a new community of content and application developers. In the new world order, content is king. Apple learned this lesson when it redefined the distribution of music with the iPod and location-based content with the iPhone, an experience the company is extending to all forms of digital content. There are other players such as Amazon with its Kindle, but the Kindle delivers only content without the opportunity to broaden the experience. Apple learned, through the consistent evolution of the iPod, that broadening the experience (in this case to include media beyond music) builds a community of brand advocates.

So while the iPad isn't really much in the way of new technology, it's profound in the way that it allows Apple to control the experience. Much has been said about Apple's rules when it comes to building applications with geo-location capabilities. It's just another example of Apple creating or defining the baseline expectations for end users and controlling the experience, presumably for the benefit of its customers. I think it also belies their effort to create an application-based advertising platform. In laying the groundwork by opening the iPhone to externally developed applications, Apple has the opportunity to unleash upon the development community new ways to tie content and experiences to applications. Inevitably, this wave of experimentation will produce unexpected combinations of advertising and applications.

Extending digital content with an advertising experience means that we can move beyond banner and pop-up ads to rich media experiences that add value to the ways consumers experience products and services. For example, an application that helps consumers select wine for a dinner party can include a vignette from a local winemaker featuring the winery along with an electronic coupon. Offsetting the cost of application development with advertising has been discussed and experimented with for sometime_look at Google's efforts to promote a free office automation alternative with advertising. The key difference is that Google controlled the application, not the platform; there is no community of content creators and developers who financially benefit from the Google model.

The Apple model will provide additional capital and revenue streams to a community that is hungry to continue building interesting applications. Consider how many applications have been created for the iPhone with only a small fee shared by Apple and the developers. Toss in some shared advertising revenue and we could see an explosion of research and development as the market attempts to build the next killer application. It reminds me of the early days of the personal computer and television rolled into a new channel of distribution. Whenever the market broadly allocates capital to technology platform, the adoption curve accelerates rapidly.

Apple is now in a position to once again redefine our digital experience and to establish a new set of expectations that the rest of the market will need to match. Core among these will be the delivery of very targeted content intended to engage consumers in a way that allows them to act immediately. While the iPhone opened this door for Apple, I think we will all be pleasantly surprised by this next wave of innovation afforded by the iPad and the content experiences it drives.