Because They Aren't Your Customers, That's Why

Madison Avenue isn’t happy with Apple’s approach to selling iAds on its mobile iDevices:

Apple has a lot of knowledge regarding its users, which it uses to improve its services and offerings, including names, addresses, locations and purchase histories. But what it doesn’t do with that data is share it with advertisers very freely. That makes Madison Avenue very mad, according to a new AdAge article detailing why Apple, and Amazon (which operates in a similar manner) aren’t having an easy time of building their respective advertising businesses.

Apple might come out ahead of its competitors on data, if it would share.

That’s a telling quote from the piece, which refers to the quality of Apple’s information, which is “one of the best” according to a former Apple software manager and one of the key architects of iAd’s data-measurement platform. But what it reveals to its advertising partner is next to nil; rather than offering a cookie-based ad-tracking and targeting mechanism, it essentially requires partners to tell it what kind of audience it needs to reach, and then trust that Apple will handle the rest, AdAge says. And it’s well worth noting that Apple prioritizes customer privacy here over a big potential upside in ad revenue.

This is typical Apple, and one of the reasons I’m such a happy customer.