Amber Neely
Apple is planning on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to buy and place ads in its App Store, similar to how Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ platforms work.
The company has begun testing with a small group of advertisers. The platform automatically decides the best spot to place ads within the App Store.
Apple has told advertisers that it is conducting tests to see if it can improve the performance of its Apple Search Ads. A source told Business Insider that they expect the company to introduce the product in the coming months.
Currently, Apple's available ad slots include a placement on the App Store Today page and a slot in the "You Might Also Like" section of an app's product page. Advertisers can enter their budget and intended audience in the new campaign type, and the algorithm will decide where best to place the ads across the available format.
Apple's own advertising business is a nascent source of revenue for the iPhone maker. Some analysts believe Apple's ad business could grow to $6 billion by 2025, with $4.1 billion of that contributed by Search Ads.
However, Apple's advertising hasn't been without controversy. In October 2022, gambling advertisements were appearing on nearly every search, regardless of what a user was searching for. The ads began showing up next to children's apps, and even gambling addiction recovery apps.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
5 Comments
AI in ads is old hat. We have had targeted ads for years so nothing new here. Every company has to bring those two words into everything they do to stay relevant.
What would be nice would be to be able to tell the App store what apps I NEVER want to see ads for. There's targeted ads, and then there's stop showing me this crap, I will never download it!
Apple is historically better than most about letting you turn off some of the targeting. Hopefully this can also be turned off. Of course the problem is that gambling companies (or other deep-pocketed spammers) will get around everything by simply buying so many slots that everyone gets it. It's like the horrible flyers pitching cheap cigars and really bad idea gold investments that spam every physical mailbox. They get the cost to print and deliver down so low that they can afford to annoy nearly everybody to catch a few suckers.
So it’s not real intelligence?
Glad we cleared that up ;)
I really hope that it is not what Tim Cook calls "breakthrough".
I do hope that this App Store ad is not a part of their AI events...
Apple has more to show at WWDC, but what I have seen based on rumors up to now, they are "nothing burgers" or at least, not breakthrough.