Apple App Store Success Is Driving Application Marketing

Television, the subway, airport luggage carousels: Where there’s an innovation, advertising is sure to follow.
The enormous success of the Apple iPhone, in part, has changed the way people live and work with their mobile devices, and has helped to increase the number of smartphone browsing and mobile application downloads.
A new report from In-Stat, “The App Store Is Born: Smartphones Enable New Marketing and Advertising Opportunities Worldwide,” discusses the potential for mobile advertising on smartphone browsers, as well as a new category called “application marketing.”
In-Stat predicts that mobile application store users will quadruple within five years, to 100 million users.
The Apple App Store has led the application-download trend. The contributions of independent developers boosted the App Store’s offerings to more than 25,000 applications, and the site saw more than 800 million downloads in just eight months’ time.
Google has an Android Market site for applications for the Android operating system-which will get a boost from the addition of Adobe Flash. Microsoft launched the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a BlackBerry App World is coming soon and so is Ovi Store, Nokia’s combination of an application store and its social-networking site.
While the measurement metrics that advertisers are currently accustomed to aren’t yet in place for application marketing, In-Stat is confident that opportunities in virtual stores are rich for mobile marketers.
“New usage models represent a rapidly growing market for mobile advertising and marketing. The report includes updated global forecasts for Windows Mobile, Android, Apple OS-X, Palm, Linux and other handset operating systems,” In-Stat said in the report, which is available here.