Apple to dissolve the current iAd sales team and automate iAd platform

“Advertising was never a business Apple was culturally comfortable with”, Greg Sterling, vice president of Strategy and Insight at the Local Search Association, told us. Many of these things Apple does poorly, especially communications. Apple apparently just doesn’t want anything to do with the ad business anymore. Hardly a second prize, more like winning Miss Congeniality (but for Quattro Wireless it was hitting the jackpot).

Apple’s iAd platform was announced by the late Steve Jobs back in 2010 and now it looks like Apple is stepping back from the platform.

Apple made a move in September to automate its iPad workbench update which is the advertising section of its Apple News. Publishers will pocket 100 percent of the revenues they generate.

Apple has been keeping 30% of ad revenue for ads sold through iAds, down from 40% initially, in exchange for the assistance of its ad sales team. “Honestly, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner – it should have”. The millions of dollars publisher were losing in sales, meant that Apple was only losing millions of dollars, when only billions would get their attention. Well the change seems like a defeat, it may actually be good for publishers and the platform. Because iAd is easy to install, many publishers have it in their stack, but it becomes less important in revenue once they bring on demand sources like Twitter’s MoPub or Google’s Admob. That sounds about right. “The rest of the world is turning to much more data-driven approaches to advertising”. In 2010 there was talk about new ad networks being started up that wanted to sell into these new digital platforms.

Publishers have also been put off by Apple’s habit of meddling in the process of creating the ads themselves, as well as their tight control of resulting marketing data.

According to a BuzzFeed report, tech giant Apple plans to dismantle its in-house iAd sales team, reconfigure the iAd platform as an automated service. The adoption of the new model implies that Apple underestimated its competitors in mobile advertising. Services, sadly, are not their specialty.