Apple To Offer Programmatic Buying Of iAds

According to a recent article on Marketing Week, tech firm Apple is due to begin offering advertisers the chance to buy mobile app inventory with programmatic buys, in an attempt to make its advertising services more accessible. iAds will be made available on a worldwide scale via this method of purchasing as the company looks to increase the value of its mobile ads, as they currently trail behind that of Google and Facebook.

Interested advertisers will be able to purchase iAd campaigns from a global marketplace, with the inventory being sold via ad technology company Rubicon Project’s exchange server, which allows brands to design and focus campaigns using first-party data from Apple.

Despite Apple previously being particularly cautious when it came to customer data, this new move to provide such information to advertisers perhaps shows that the company is becoming more open to the notion of sharing in a bid to grow its iAd offering. The business has admitted that mobile ads are a particularly small section of its business and that it has had issues with trying to win ad budgets in the past.

Apple launched the iAd service in 2011 with the promise that it would provide a more targeted and first-class solution to advertisers. The high cost and limited reach, however, meant this initial foray was unsuccessful. Earlier this year the company announced that it was going to make iAds available to non-registered mobile app developers to try and increase the number of iAds in use on the market.

The latest software update from Apple hinted at this move, with brands able to re-target ads based on the in-app browsing behaviours of users and eventually look at cross-device retargeting.