I’m a huge Apple fan. For the last nine years I have followed Apple very closely, waiting for the next big thing. After watching the recent iPhone 4 Keynote (which has some great additions), I’m really pondering how it will affect the Church and how much mobile platforms are relevant to the Church.
Over the past few years, I have seen churches really boost marketing and communication to their audiences. I havent seen much mobile advertising, but are we headed in that direction? Will organizations start positioning their communications and marketing strategies into mobile platforms?
iAd
Apple’s iAd has some promising features. Steve Jobs hit the nail on the head when he stated mobile advertising sucked. Awful graphics with no emotion is one reason TV is still such a great avenue. We all know how well television can portray emotion.
According to Apple:
“iAd is a breakthrough mobile advertising platform from Apple. With it, apps can feature rich media ads that combine the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web. For developers, it means a new, easy-to-implement source of revenue. For advertisers, it creates a new media outlet that offers consumers highly targeted information.”
Now with this new resource, we can display some of the emotion that helped drive us to the Lord. We all do our best to come up with some catchy phrase or some creative words that will draw an individual to look deeper at what we are sharing. It is our job to be real with people. Those we are trying to reach want something authentic, and when we are real God can work through us.
With that said, will we pour resources into these new avenues of marketing? Will the Church start asking folks what mobile platform they use in surveys and connection cards? Will iAd allow you to set the demographics?
Your Thoughts
I am just now learning about iAd so there is still lots of discussion to take place through future posts. What are your thoughts on mobile advertising? Have you had any success or failures with it. Will iAd change mobile advertising as the iPhone changed mobile devices? Time will always tell, but I would like to be in the forefront of it changing church marketing.
Today’s post was written by Jon Bradley. Jon is a full-time fireman in Charlotte, NC. When he’s not putting out fires, he has a strong passion for helping organizations use all forms of media to progress their vision. Jon is a partner with Eden Investment Group and ISI Media Group “Iron Sharpens Iron. You can follow him on Twitter @jonbrad22.
I am impressed with the creative and technical promise of iAds, but I think their usefulness to churches will depend greatly on how narrowly you can target your campaign. It would do my Oklahoma based church no good to be advertised on someone’s mobile device in Brussels.
Very true Eric, I can’t see the advertising platform working in such a wide demographics. But if you can narrow it down to the key areas and so forth it could be powerful! I would really hope Apple wouldn’t put it out there for demographics not to play an important roll.