As the mighty ‘Claw’s resident Apple zealot, imagine my joy upon checking macrumors.com last night and discovering that Apple had announced the release of a new set of tools for the creation of iAds on the Apple Developer site. You could say Christmas came early for me and my pants.

iAds have been a largely profitable venture for Apple and it’s advertisers who have seen a large ROI since their initial U.S release earlier this year at the WWDC (Apple Developer Conference). Although this success has been limited to the U.S since then due to regional launches, Apple are believed to be readying iAds for launch in European markets any day now and the release of these tools seem to be somewhat of a foreshadow to this release from the notoriously secretive Apple with rumours suggesting that Apple will be leading the charge (at least on iPad) with an in-house developed TRON Legacy iAd.

The problem with iAds, until now, has been that iAd development has been solely Apple’s business. You want an iAd? Apple builds it and apparently the level of control that Apple demands has put off some big name clients which had invested silly amounts of money into the iAd scheme.

That is until NOW! The iAd Producer Tools, released last night, look slick. Apple’s answer to advertisers scared to abandon Flash, it comes complete with a over a dozen templates for creating pages (including Coverflow style carousels) along with animations, standardised UI graphics and the like whilst allowing developers to drop in their own media assets. All wrapped up in a sexy HTML5-CSS3-Javascript bundle. The Producer Tools look the absolute sex.

With Mobile expected to account for 5% of advertising in 2011 (up 2% on 2010 and continuing to expand), the high ROI of iAds and the relative dominace of iOS in European markets, can your company afford not to look at iAds as a method of ad delivery in 2011? The Blueclaw team are looking at the new Producer Tools today for how we can work with these new processes, with the view to start production in 2011 and I, for one, am SLATHERING at the opportunity.

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Advertising, Brand value, Company News, Web Development