Location-based ads & Apple exclusivity

Apple recently published a developer tip that said applications accessing location information primarily for advertising targeting would be rejected – applications had to provide users with ‘beneficial information’. Gizmodo picked up on it, and claimed – referencing a tweet from Craig Hockenberry – that Apple would be keeping location-based advertising for itself, no doubt powered by the Quattro acquisition.

Divining the future intentions of Apple from their present external behavior reminds me of Sovietology papers from the 70s – complex theories about shifting intentions and attitudes, all based off of who was standing closest to Brezhnev on the dias at the May Day parade – but I didn’t read the same thing into this at all. While Apple’s certainly paying more attention to mobile advertising on the iPhone, that developer tip is to protect the user experience. No user should be asked to share their location without any visible benefit to them in the app – it wastes the user’s time and it gets the tinfoil hat crowd wondering what exactly sharing that location was for. Analytics providers do use location data to produce some city-level aggregated stats, but they generally stress that location shouldn’t be sent if it’s not already a natural part of the application, because of this impact on the user.

If Apple really wanted to lock down location-based mobile advertising, the tip would’ve likely been written differently – “applications using Core Location for the purposes of ad targeting will be rejected.” We’ll see how this goes, but I think the many location-based advertising startups can breathe a sigh of relief. And I suspect larger ad networks don’t have to be concerned at all – I believe their campaigns are largely targeted to the country level, and that can be done pretty reliably just from the IP address.

BRIEF UPDATE: Heh, and now TechCrunch is writing about the same issue, calling it ‘geo-spam’. Looks like it’s mountain out of a molehill time. Unless Apple’s going to block geolocation for ad targeting altogether, none of this matters much – since campaigns generally aren’t more local than a DMA (designated marketing area), any ad network with a modicum of competence and a bit of reach already knows enough about your location from your IP or your use of other applications.