Apple’s new flagship phones no great departure for advertisers

Apple's new versions of the iPhone 5 proved largely underwhelming, providing little significant impact for the ad industry as the tech giant is essentially using the same hardware as in its predecessor, according mobile analysts at Tongue.

The changes to Apple's new high-end flagship iPhone 5S have proven mostly incremental, aside from a nifty fingerprint scanner built into the home button.

"Whilst not a technical innovation it does reflect Apple’s long held mantra of taking existing technology and then ‘borrowing’ and redefining it," said John Du Vernet's, managing partner at Tongue, who added that one impact for the user could be that their personal data and purchases will be more secured using biometrics.

"Your biometric data is now being housed somewhere and Apple is going to need to be aware of the sensitivity of housing that data, our fingerprints are used for airport security, and in the future, no doubt for our banking and wherever there is data, so there is data housing and potentially data leaking,” said Du Vernet.

“Using this data could mean that as advertisers we will be able to add a whole other level of targeting to our already very precise ads, many phones are used by multiple-persons in a family whether to browse Wikipedia or simply game, if the iPhone 5S has the ability to store multiple persons data then we can target out new toys to the children when they are playing games or the new gardening set to grandpa when he’s reading the news," he added.

Du Vernet also said the lack of NFC on the new phone shows yet again Apple is pursuing a closed eco-system.

"NFC would serve users as it would ensure mobile payments, ticketing and better two way communications with brands. One can only assume Apple would want to keep this inside the iTunes eco-system. Apple fans won't care, but Google advocates will again have strong evidence that Apple is sticking to its closed eco-system at the detriment of true innovation," he said.

In a major break for Apple, the company is looking down market by introducing the iPhone 5C, a lower-priced phone designed to sell largely in lower-priced international markets. The phone, using plastic casing, uses the same processor as the iPhone 5, but comes in green, white, blue, pink, and yellow.

“Whilst more impactful for overseas markets there are a few notable impacts for marketers locally,” said Du Vernet.

"Depending on what source you read, Australia has a 70% – 80% smartphone penetration. so most people are already onboard in some way shape or form. The iPhone 5C may be well placed for the 'silver surfers' for our pre-teens who got onboard with hand me down iPhones, and require only basic functionality and are not concerned with showing off their ‘space gray’ metallic iPhone 5S."

He added that what it does mean is that iOS7 will have a steeper uptake than previous iOS’s, meaning agencies may not have as much between time to learn from and adapt iOS7 builds.

In Australia, the iPhone 5S will cost $869, $999 and $1129 for the 16, 32 and 64GB models. The iPhone 5C will be a tad cheaper at $739 and $869 for 16 and 32 GB of storage respectively.

Tongue also took a look at some of the other features on the new versions of the iPhone to see how they stacked up:

iOS7 App dashboard

This will make it easier to see open apps, to multitask and ultimately kill your apps when not in use. The impact being that there will be less ambient apps running, that consumers will become more fickle and you’ll see shorter windows of time when you’re apps are being used (watch your analytics and pre-empt with your clients)

Apps around me

The upgraded app-store included sorting apps by ‘apps around me’ or ‘location based’. Depending on how the meta data is fed in for this, this could have a positive impact for traditional outlets meaning your app could be appearing top when someone is in your store (it would be great if you could plug in all your store location data in here but were still not sure what will be available). It could also create interesting opportunities for story telling as part of larger campaigns or merely just increase the holy grail of find-ability for local app developers.

AirDrop

This uses your Bluetooth in iOS7 to create private sharing hotspots for data. This could have an interesting user case for sharing location based content from brands – think Starbucks offering all of Pacific Magazine titles for free but only whilst they remain in Starbucks, or flights distributing safety cards via mobile whilst on the ground.

Safari redefined

The Safari browser has been redefined, it optimises for browsing with the search bar disappearing to provide more viewable screen, which is a plus for content marketers. What’s more it's alot faster, meaning less loading times and potentially therefore more viewing of our longer form content. Notably the browser is slightly better set up to handle HTML5 but still lagging behind the majority of other OSs (HTML5test.com)

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