March 29 — What Marketers Need To Know From Today’s Apple Event
Now that the Apple Keynote is over, I wanted to provide some snapshots about how todays announcements could impact marketers. If you are looking for a short brief of the entire event, check here.
Apple TV
- Apple TV, lower price, $69
- HBO Now — $14.99 a month, first month free through AppleTV, Launching in April
How this affects marketers:
Apple continues to help consumers avoid having to sign up with the large cable providers and get their content ala carte. While many of the viewing options require a cable subscription, HBO moving to a no cable model will be the new norm. Only recently did YouTube add advertising to their Apple TV and mobile streams, so it will be interesting to see how others will grow their ad opportunities on these new cord cutting platforms. We’ve yet to see any platform leverage the interactive capabilities that a connected streaming box could do. Who ever pushes an Apple TV or a Roku to allow for this interactivity will win some serious cool points.
Research Kit
- ResearchKit — a framework that help’s in medical research, allows the large numbers of iOS users to help in the research of diseases
- The first apps made with ResearchKit target Parkinson’s, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and breast cancer
How this affects marketers:
If you have a healthcare client, or are in any way involved in peoples well being, start figuring out how to get into HealthKit. The opportunities for your grocery, food, medical clients to build into this open source platform are growing with every iteration of iOS. Soon, consumers will start to demand that your data feed into their health dashboards.
MacBook
- New 12" Retina MacBook, in Gold, Silver, Space Grey. Start making friends in your companies computer procurement department to make sure you get the color you want. haha.
How this affects marketers:
It doesn’t, except for the fact that now you will have one more thing to consider when you go to select a laptop. Color.
Apple Watch
- Glances — Light weight interactions that take place on the watch with a swipe. In the demo we were shown examples from Salesforce and top trends on Twitter
- Learn more about building for the Glances UI standards here. https://developer.apple.com/watchkit/
- Stickers — Fun emojis that you can use in messages on Apple Watch
- Apple Watch and Apple Pay make mobile payments easier
- The Instagram app was shown, seems like a lot of tapping to do simple interactions. But great for quick looks at your feed
- Uber App shown, it’s never been easier to call for a car
- The SPG Hotel app allows you to check in based on location and to unlock doors with NFC
- Shazam app will give you song name, album art, and lyrics in sync with the song
- Pre-order on April 10th, and you can demo it then. Available April 24th
How this affects marketers:
This represents the first wearable product that most general consumes will be interested in owning. Early adopters will be the first to purchase because of the pricing, but the general public will adopt some kind of wearable computing going forward from this product launch.
Marketers will need to start learning how to make valuable lightweight interactions in order to build experiences that are optimized for the wearable UI.
An initial reaction would be that brands first opportunities will come in the form of a utility. Think of ways that your brand could exist on the Apple Watch by adding functionality. If you are a car brand, how can you send data to the watch. For grocery, how do we make shoppers lives easier by providing a shopping list.
In Review
Apple is showing that it plans on being a major contender when it comes to our time connected. Not only is Apple showcasing it’s ability to make hardware that consumers want, but it’s also showing why we should build the content for it’s platforms.
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