Apple has something different up its sleeve: an advertising platform that will deliver personalized ads to the iPhone, iPod Touch and the soon-to-ship iPad, to be announced shortly after consumers first lay hands on the iPad on April 7.

According to unnamed "executives familiar with the plan" who apparently told Online Media Daily about this, Apple expects this new ad platform to have as significant an impact on its business as its iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad launches, and Steve Jobs apparently referred to these mobile ads as the company's "next big thing."

The report referred to the new platform as "iAd," although that may not be the actual name of the initiative. Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said the company does not comment on rumor or speculation.

So, why is Apple getting into advertising, assuming this report is accurate? Well, why not?

Mobile devices, with their extensive knowledge of where you are and what you're doing, hold great potential for advertisers, ever-eager to put their wares in front of a specific slice of the general population.

Do you suspect that women aged 18 to 30 who are sitting in hair salons on sunny Saturday afternoons would be particularly likely to appreciate your company's moisturizer? Mobile ads are capable of targeting them in ways that print magazines were not, and can even slice demographics with more precision than websites, which generally don't know that people are sitting in hair salons.

Apple paid approximately $300 million for mobile advertising firm Quattro Wireless about three months ago. This reported April 7 announcement appears to be about re-purposing that technology into something general to serve ads across Apple's growing line of mobile devices.

Quattro's design elements include videos, photo galleries, wallpaper, ringtones, deep links to products on websites, and the ability to share an ad with friends. It reports back to advertisers with 15 metrics they can use to track their ads' effectiveness, in order to tweak them on-the-fly and improve their targeting. The firm says it can deliver ads based on gender, age, household income, location, time, ethnicity and education, which it says it gets from "non-personally-identifiable information," the devices' time and location awareness, and users' answers to registration questions.

Apple currently bans app developers from including location-aware ads in apps that do not make other significant use of location. So, it would be against the rules for, say, one of the perennially-popular flatulence simulator apps to deliver an advertisement based on a user's location. We assume that it will apply these same rules to its own Quattro-powered ad platform.

The upshot: App developers of all kinds will have a big incentive to include location-aware functionality in their apps, so they'll be allowed to include more lucrative location-aware ads. Advertising is changing music into a visual medium. Next, it could make apps more location-aware, not only because users need to grant an app permission to use their location on an iPhone, but because iTunes' app store rules dictate that location has to be a feature if it is to be used for ads.

Of course, this won't be just about Apple devices. In the spirit of "anything you can do I can do better," Google – the search-monetizing behemoth that's making inroads as a smartphone power – acquired Quattro-competitor AdMob for $750 million in November, reportedly after Apple had expressed interest.

Like Android copied the iPhone, Google AdMob will likely deliver an experience on Google's mobile platform that's similar to Apple's mobile ads, leading to a general rise in free (ad-supported) location-aware apps that don't require payment, but deliver ads based on where you are and what you are doing.

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