Oh dear. Jobs stuck the knife in and gave it a good twist when demonstrating the NY times website on the iPad yesterday.
Notice the broken plugin links? The iPad doesn't support flash, and undoubtedly won't support flash in the future. Unless forced to, which is at 'best' a few years away. I wouldn't bet on it happening, if iPad is a huge success (and it might be) it could even force Flash from the mainstream web.
For those of us suffering the ignominy of working in advertising, this matters. When we say banner, we hope to mean 'rich media banner', and by that we mean a flash file. The broken links in the NY times weren't newspaper content, they were ads.
If you visit a site on the iPad, all the flash banners (meaning all the expensive ads) won't play. Nice for the user! Not so nice for the media planner.
I watched the whole keynote (stayed up too late) and fell off my chair only once: at the time I least expected to: when Apple announced the price. At that price Apple is going to sell a scary amount of these things. Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones, 21 million iPods, and 3.3 million macs in the last quarter. I'll stick my d##k in the mashed potatoes and guess they'll sell over 10 million iPads this year. That's a sizeable target audience for marketing to, given they'll all be at least reasonably affluent early adopters or impressionable teenagers with lots of pocket money.
"But no!" you say. "Flash has too much traction, they'll have to bow to popular pressure".
But... pressure from who? There are 3 other big companies in mobile device OS's:
Google: no love for Flash. Their willingness to produce a non-Flash version of Youtube tells all.
Microsoft have their own competitor to Flash: Silverlight. They'd be quite happy to see Flash take a beating. I'd expect to see Silverlight as a development environment for their next generation of mobile devices.
Nokia: nope. With Symbian and Maemo on the go, Flash is a distraction Nokia could do without.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Ah well, time to modify our banner production formats. Next target: campaign sites.
5 comments:
With Murdoch rallying newspapers to move to a pay-per-view or subscription model, perhaps iPad users will get lucky with the smart consumers heaven: Pay for no advertising in your life.
The scary reality is that advertisers still have the old-school tricks up their sleeves: The glory of Quicktime and return of the interstitial (please no!).
Could this be the new window of opportunity for "Flash the hard-way"; Does the iPad support (Java)script?
Dude, Nokia has been supporting Flash for a long time already..
Nokia and Flash? Yes they have, but I don't think they're enthusiastic about it. They'd rather you used their UX / developer frameworks (eg: QT for Symbian).
I'd love to see a 'pay more' for no advertising model for 'print' on the iPad. It's how TV works on iTunes currently. But I suspect it'll be modelled on the current model: pay a cover price / subscription price plus get ads at the same time.
One possibility is one brand paying a lot to bring you the rest of the experience 'ad-free'. Seen that a bit with movies in the US, where otherwise they're unwatchable on most stations.
And yes, iPad has full javascript support. Plus HTML 5 via Safari 4.x
The funny thing is, you'll still probably end up using Flash to make your shitty banners.
Watch the last minute of this:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/10/sneak_peek_ai_fl_dw_canvas.html
It just won't get the blame anymore. For the iPod guys, enjoy your bannerless browsing while it lasts, as companies will be switching to HTML5 just about as soon as CS5 is released.
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