There’s little imperative to get excited, though. All of these details hit the web today, it’s true, via the Taiwanese blog Digitimes, with hazy attribution to sources somewhere in the supply chain. According to Digitimes, Apple declined comment. Other voices around the web point out it’s questionable that Apple would unveil any iPad 3 at a gathering that isn’t an official Apple event, and that it’s questionable whether suppliers would be privy to so many technical details.

But hey, daydreaming never hurt anyone.

ADOTAS

Although a Tapjoy spokesperson said this plan had been in the works before the Apple smackdown, it’s hard not to see Tapjoy’s beta version of its Personal App Marketplace and reformatting of its website to a consumer-facing entity as a response to its banishment.

After garnering app information from users signing up through the mobile website, Tapjoy recommends other apps based on likes and dislikes, apps currently being used, apps used by friends and other factors. In addition, the site informs users of value exchange opportunities for virtual currency, including incentivized downloads and video interaction deals.

It sounds a bit like mobile app depot GetJar — particularly the social integration that allows users to hook up with friends — with more marketing opportunities for both developers and advertisers.

The current-day version of Tapjoy emerged after offer marketer OfferPal acquired the company and its name following a media scandal about deceitful offer-marketing schemes linked for virtual goods on social gaming sites.

ADOTAS – While we were writing some blogs at SocialNuggets, we thought of adding thumbnails of various tablets. Then started our search on Google and Yahoo! for images of various tablets. What we found was an utter lack of branding in the tablet marketplace — except in the case of Apple.

Here is a chart we produced with thumbnails of various tablets. Can you really recognize any of the tablets? Well, I can only recognize Apple’s iPad and none else. When I asked people who own non-iPad tablets to tell me which thumbnails pointed to their Android based tablets, most of them failed in this exercise.

How About Smartphones?

Just having an Android label to kick start the market was a great idea and it worked for smartphones. However, if you ever see an HTC phone, it does have a clock image that can be differentiated even in the smallest of the thumbnails. BlackBerry has a very unique image that distinguishes it. Samsung doesn’t have a consistent image but with the launch of Galaxy II, it is getting better at it.

So What Happened to Tablets?

Needless to say Apple is the only manufacturer whose iPad tablets have a very differentiating look no matter which angle you look at. For some reason every other tablet (sorry HTC, clock is not enough to differentiate your tablet) manufacturer went with generic Android look except for some minor differences. Even RIM chose the generic look for its Playbook, leaving it no differentiation in appearance.

Oh yes, HP folks probably recognize their blue screen which became the blue screen of death for the device. It seems Amazon has learned that lesson already and has a distinguishing image for itself. This may not be sufficient but will contribute to its success.

Rethinking Product Looks in the Age of Internet

In the age of the Internet, products are typically evaluated online first. If your product doesn’t have a unique look, it will be lost in the crowd and all of your branding exercises will merely go to waste. So before you put out a product in the market, see what its thumbnail looks like on the web when your customers search for it.

His passing was not one of those details that you make a note of, not something of significance but ultimately insignificant. Jobs’ death is a social phenomenon. When we read the news later today, it will not surprise us to learn that his departure has received more mentions than when news of Osama bin Laden was finally terminated.

We say his is a social phenomenon not simply because of the numerous mentions on Facebook and Twitter. We describe it as social, because the reaction is not one of reflection of emails about his death. Friends didn’t write friends to discuss the impact he had on each others’ lives.

His life and, as a result, his passing is a profoundly cultural experience. We feel compelled to share that we know and that we too were touched by what he did. It is as though each person wants to share how much he has touched their lives. Remarks such as “I hope I can impact one person as much as Steve Jobs has impacted millions,” and, ” “This world wouldn’t have been the same without Steve Jobs,” are commonplace.

Even Nordstrom-owned Hautelook felt the need to post, ” Thank you Steve Jobs for creating the interconnected inspired world we know today.” The Obamas, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg all put out statements as well.

Washington Post contributor Hank Stuever says, “That is what Steve Jobs gave us: the future. A sense of ourselves moving forward into this century, which has proved especially hard to do, with its lack of employment opportunities and its addiction to panic. He gave us a look at the future and all the ambivalence and worry that comes with it. It was the most elegant form of social disruption, and now your kids won’t glance up from their iPhones. They’ll never need to.”

This echoes a sentiment we saw on Facebook — namely, “Some say it will end with him, but I say he gave us the tools and paved the way for something greater. Tomorrow we push towards the greatness and make him proud. ” All great sentiments, and we have no doubt that in the days, weeks, months, and years to come, there will be no shortage of additional eloquent reflections, amazing statistics and anecdotes.

While Jobs lived much longer than almost anyone with pancreatic cancer, most agree that this is a reminder that we are all human. His life though is the exception to almost any rule, and perhaps that is why we are attracted to him even more. Yes, he touched billions of lives, and he achieved what almost anyone would have loved to do — fame, fortune, and defining industries.

And in a movie-like ending, it’s almost as though he was holding on, beating the odds until he found a point where he could let go — like some hero in a movie that hangs on longer than anyone thought possible but slips away when everyone else is safe. Yes, there are no shortage of almost super hero story lines.

Yet, there is almost something more. Were Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to unfortunately pass, he will not be remembered nearly the same way Jobs will be, even though he too has fundamentally altered people’s lives. There truly is something unique about the professional life of Jobs in how he had both early success, then failure, then astounding success across all things digital.

Perhaps, though, Jobs’ life is also a little tragic. It’s a life of a visionary. His products are revered. We love him for his innovations and perhaps curse him too for the rigidity and unwillingness to let us be us. In his products we saw a version of utopia that had some slightly scary aspects to it.

But, the inventions is where the love ends. No one talks about or will talk about Steve the person. No one will remember him for being kind, caring and making other humans better. We love what he created and almost revere him as a result, falling into the carefully crafted persona, the bitten apple and him as our cult leader.

We can’t love him, and those who say they do are being disingenuous. People worship him and his products, and that’s why it’s a social experience as we all have something in common. He gave us something, but he has not impacted our humanity — only the human experience.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “Steve Jobs has died.”

Most of the crowd didn’t flinch. “Sheesh, that’s old news,” snorted the girl sitting to my right.

Not to me, I thought — I had left my iPhone at home to avoid any distractions from the Portishead concert, the band’s first performance in NYC in 13 years and my first opportunity to see them ever. At the same time, the news sounded like an out-of-control Twitter rumor following Apple lovers’ disappointment with the iPhone 4S announcement.

And the way Mr. Beard belted out the announcement suggested that breaking the solemn news of Jobs’ death somehow made him important. But these are the times we live in – our digital toys, be they physical (smartphone) or virtual (social network), serve as instant ego pumps.

Of course, thanks to Jobs and company, there was an easy way to find if the Apple cofounder had passed.

“Is it true?” I asked my wife, who pulled out her own iPhone. Throughout the un-engaging opening act, she had been catching up with her social circle courtesy of the Facebook app. The top story on her favorite news app was “Steve Jobs Dies at Age 56.”

I didn’t need to see anymore — Jobs’ fight against pancreatic cancer was well-known, and made him of model of perseverance when he launched Apple’s most important products (certainly the ones that turned Apple into the most valued company in the world) following his diagnosis in 2004.

“You’re going to have a lot to write tomorrow,” the wife commented.

As Portishead launched into the cowbell-driven “Magic Doors,” possibly my favorite track of their last album, “Third,”  I thought about the endless tributes I’d see across the Internet today — from the mainstream press, from the tech media, from the blogs, from my friends on Facebook. When he announced his resignation from Apple in August, it seemed as if he already had been eulogized. I wondered if some pubs would simply reprint what they had published that week.

And what would I write? What would I type out on my Apple keyboard hooked up to my MacBook?

The deification of Jobs drove me nuts, symbolic of a disturbing trend of idolization driven by omnipresent media. The cult of Mac and the Apple worshippers still freak me out – it’s just technology, folks. Steve Jobs was a man — a brilliant man that led a company full of brilliant souls back from the dead to rule the field of consumer electronics.

Disagree if you must, but the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad are the standard models for their device fields. Sure, other digital music players, smartphones and tablet computers existed before, but Jobs & crew revolutionized the user interface/user experience. It wasn’t surprising as they did the same thing for personal computers with the Mac OS. Much of the functionality was there for such devices, only using them delivered migraines. That was Jobs’ true genius — fantastic insight into UX configuration.

Now you really can’t look at or use any (quality) portable MP3 player, smartphone or tablet without recognizing its roots in Apple products — and by extension, Jobs. As I joked to my wife last night, “Steve Jobs’ legacy may be that any asshole can use a smartphone.”

At the same time, he shoved the doors wide open for mobile marketing, which had been pretty much limited to text marketing, with the introduction of the iPhone. Suddenly mobile search (now with geolocation!) and display on the mobile web and within mobile applications were not only feasible, but necessary for reaching consumers on the move. Beyond that, mobile social interactions led to innovations in mobile couponing and branding. Engagement possibilities seemed endless.

In addition, the iAd may not have set a standard for mobile advertising, but it definitely inspired a whole new generation of rich media mobile advertising with the concept of an app within an app.

All these thoughts ran through my mind as Beth Gibbons, whose voice is just as powerful and haunting as it was on Portishead’s debut, “Dummy,” moaned the exit melody to “Wandering Star.” Somewhere on stage I reckoned a MacBook Pro was toiling away, adding to the soundscape. No doubt backstage more Apple products were being employed to deliver the fantastic sound and light show, furthering the enjoyment of our consumer experience.

Staring over the audience in the general admission area below, a swath of glowing screens danced among the darkened mass of people. It’s a sight I still haven’t become used to — crowds busily using their smartphones and tablets during concerts, effectively adding an audience light show. Some were snapping pictures, some were recording video, some were catching audio, some were sharing with friends and the world the fact that they, right at this very moment, were loving the first Portishead show in New York City in 13 years — OMG, don’t you wish you were here?

And then guitarist Adrian Utley picked the opening notes of “Over.” Gibbons sang in a desperate whisper:

I can’t hold this day

Anymore…

I can’t mold this stage

Anymore

With Steve Jobs’ death, we’ve lost a beacon in the disorienting world of technological innovation, a visionary who made constantly evolving digital tools accessible to the masses. For better or worse, Apple’s innovations  empowered consumers with the connectivity that had long been the stuff of science fiction.

Jobs arguably paved the digital future for consumers and thus became the icon for our constant state of connection — and goodness, how powerful swimming in the endless communication stream makes us feel. The sensations of importance and stability this state of connectivity brings us.

Without Jobs, to quote Portishead again, uncertainty is taking us over.

The medium will gain momentum with the debut Apple’s iOS5, because the system’s new notification center makes push messaging more consumer friendly on iOS devices. Next, I think the real value of push notifications will become glaringly apparent as marketers realize its ability to get customers actively engaged with mobile content and applications.

This is also an enormous, and welcomed, shift for developers. It gives them another mechanism and medium for driving customers to interact with their brand while creating additional touchpoints, or engagement, with those customers. This is the new holy grail for mobile.

A Growing Push for Push Marketing

The expanding market for push notifications is timely and reflects its increasing relevance to mobile marketing. The industry has learned that obsession with driving downloads is ineffective as a long-term strategy: Despite the money invested in developing mobile applications, only about 5% of mobile apps are used 30 days after they’re downloaded by customers.

Focusing on downloads is also becoming passé: It’s akin to the first waves of web marketing, when driving page views was the goal. In today’s mobile environment, marketers want people actively engaging, better yet, spending money while they’re at it. And do this on a continued basis, which is what success is all about.

Push notifications serve these marketing objectives because they can reach mobile customers, stimulate interactions with them, even if they are not using the app or their device at the time. Customers are responding. For example, according to a recent study by comScore, 14% of consumers representing Groupon and LivingSocial users said they engage with the app after receiving an offer sent via push notification to their phones. This is not surprising and the engagement rates are certain to grow as push matures and the market and marketers become more familiar with it.

Push works because it takes advantage of mobile as an intent-driven platform. It focuses on the customer’s reasons and motivations for using a device, such as shopping, following sports scores, or playing a game, and it creates conversations with the users around those activities. But it’s also about real-time social sharing of content, like music, pictures, and video.

In addition, when you consider that most devices now are location aware, messages in real time become even more compelling. Finally, apps can be designed to include rich media such as video, audio, maps or actionable content like coupons or voter polls to a message, which enriches the entire experience and strengthens the overall appeal.

Marketers like push notifications because they generate a wealth of metrics that can be used to analyze the success of their ads, get to know their customers better and create one to one relationships that are more effective. The technology can generate quantifiable statistics on many variables that indicate, among other things:

• how often customers return to an app;
• how much time they spend with it;
• if they take an action requested by an ad;
• if they unsubscribe; and
• most important, how the app performs against others in its category.

A company will be able to tell, for example, if it is losing subscribers in a category that other firms are excelling in, and if this is the case, it can adjust its approach accordingly to better compete.

The SMS Angle

General trends in the mobile industry favor increased use of push notifications. For example, numerous research firms are projecting that app-to-device messaging will become a much more significant part of the SMS market.

A2P promotions delivered via push notifications should do even better than that. Push-based A2P notifications are easier to respond to, because the notification takes the customer straight to the app without requiring clicking through to a URL. The analytics that push notifications generate give it value that SMS can’t provide. And push is less costly and more valuable to brands, marketers, carriers and consumers than SMS.

Companies have of course embraced marketing via SMS because it can reach almost all handsets. But it is short-sighted to focus all of a company’s campaigns on SMS. It is not particularly easy to build programs and services around SMS, for one thing, but also the margins for SMS-based campaigns are razor-thin. SMS fees are assessed on a per-message basis, and depending on the type of message used and its destination, SMS messaging can cost an advertiser up to 3 cents per message.

Push notifications, which travel over the mobile data network, are easier to build and distribute and as more and more mobile data networks are deployed around the world, the addressable market for push notifications will increase. Nor are push notifications limited to mobile. They can target any device that is connected to the Internet and the more screens the customer engages with, including connected TVs, set-top boxes and gaming platforms in the home, the more opportunity this will bring.

Finally, push services do not incur SMS fees and they can be purchased according to a variety of flexible pricing schemes that can be friendly to any marketer. Prices can be based strictly on the number of devices or the number of installed apps receiving the notifications, which can allow distribution of unlimited messages to those devices or apps.

So we look forward to seeing what Apple and iOS5 can do to bring more mobile innovation to the market, and are prepared to make that easy to take advantage of when designing and launching apps.

Read more about Scott Kveton’s firm Urban Airship and mobile push marketing here.

While nobody would deny that Apple has an incredible design and product team in place, the final call on decisions large and small no longer sits with one of the most respected business and design thinkers in the world. So how can Apple ensure that it stays on the right path?

When faced with design or product related challenges, many Apple employees have often asked themselves “What would Steve do?” This question sums up a long standing approach for many at the consumer electronics powerhouse, but the final stamp of approval and the decision on the table will now sit with someone else. Will employees soon be asking themselves “What would Tim do?”

To ensure the best chance of success, millions – sometimes billions – of dollars go into the R&D of a new product, ensuring that it excites the market and ultimately flies off the shelves. However, in my opinion, it’s “the art of logic” that enables the decision-maker in a company like Apple to repeatedly win over their audience.

Any great product is a combination of hundreds if not thousands of small binary decisions. Should the product be black or white? Should the “rotate key” lock the screen or would it be better placed as a “mute” key? Clearly someone has to make the decision, and it needs to be consistent throughout an upcoming product line.

Often, no amount of R&D can help. It’s a combination of understanding the market, having a crystal-clear vision of the user experience benefit and taking it to the next level. That intelligence needs to be packaged up and taken forward with a sheer determination that allows the person in the driving seat to remain focused, ignore distractions, and avoid developing an ego that blocks input from others.

So, to achieve the incredible success that Apple has experienced, you need to harness the art of logic. It means finding a way forward that combines the art of predicting what users are going to want in the future, and the science of involving users in creation by harvesting their feedback on future plans. Or to put it another way, the art of logic leads to a highest common denominator between creating and fulfilling needs.

The “art” is making a conscious prediction about the future that will differentiate you from the competition, while the “logic” involves meticulously applying the same knowledge as your rivals. If several businesses are entering the same sector and are researched in the same way, they will probably deliver similar results. But if one applies the art side and takes a bold gamble on something (e.g. an unproved technology, an underdog, a weak trend), they can achieve differentiation.

The question that many Apple fans, industry analysts, shareholders and journalists are asking is “Does Tim Cook have the power to continue the success of Apple?” Unfortunately, the “art of logic” is not a skill or task that can be delegated down the food chain. It has to sit with the person at the top. If it’s passed around the team, the “final call” decision process becomes diluted and unstable and it simply won’t stand up as time progresses. This is how a product line can easily become fragmented.

Only time will tell whether Apple’s new leader will have the ability to continue the journey. With Steve Jobs still playing an important role at the company, it would be surprising to see any decisions made in the near future that fundamentally rock the boat, but any inconsistencies in upcoming designs could suggest that Tim isn’t applying the same potent mix of logic and art as his predecessor.

That’s pretty hard to do in a world where so much of what gets done is reactive. You can have all the best ideas but be forced to abandon them almost in a heartbeat. The only way around that is when you reach a certain point where, like Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce, you have such an engaged audience that lives and dies by the platform, or Apple, which enjoys the halo of a technology company with the physical product cycle of a more traditional product manufacturer.

Somewhere between the more straightforward shareholder meeting and Apple’s World Wide Developer conference sits Facebook’s experience. Their platform reached a level of prominence in the programming community where the company needed to start having its own event. An overall industry still makes sense, but for the company to truly capitalize both strategically on the corporate buzz as well as more tactically mobilize the developer base, it had to control the environment and messaging.

That’s what the company’s f8 event, that took place yesterday, is all about. Tickets to the event sold out about as fast as those to I Heart Radio festival also taking place today. I sat next to someone who couldn’t get tickets and it required the chairman of this billion-dollar business to call up a favor and get this person in.

While Facebook doesn’t enjoy the manufacturer’s product lifecycle like Apple does, they too have begun to use their conference to announce significant product enhancements. Many people claim that this event ranks among the most important as the company hasn’t had a truly meaningful release since the Like button more than a year ago.

As to what Facebook unveils, the pre-launch consensus centered around content consumption and sharing, adding music and television to the preexisting suite of photo sharing and status sharing. Reading the Business Insider list as to their predictions, which spans everything from an iPad app to increased emphasis on Facebook Credits, you can’t help but gravitate towards a saying that noted internet analyst Lou Kerner coined while talking about Facebook. He called it “the second internet.”

Reading through the pre-announcement list, if even half of the predictions come true, the business starts to feel eerily like AOL in the mid 1990s.

For those who remember the original AOL, it truly was the Internet. There was no browser. It was the walled garden much like cell phone content pre-mobile web. You connected to the internet via AOL and all your activities took place within the confines of AOL. As it was still early at the time, some things didn’t take place like commerce, but for just about anything else, the only thing that mattered for a brand was their integration and inclusion in AOL.

We may not have entered an exact parallel because there are so many other sites and services outside of Facebook that people will use, but everything we seem to read has Facebook creating services to make it hard for people to need to leave Facebook. The site not only has their entire social graph, but it will soon be their social graph. They are making more than just an identity play but what can only be described as another version of the Internet.

Like Google, most of the services don’t appear to have any immediate revenue potential – think Google News or Google Docs. They seem designed simply to make sure your online life revolves even further around the company. If Google is the doorway to the first internet. Facebook wants to simply be the internet.

Facebook has stated, perhaps less for grandiosity and more for focus, that it would like to become the first trillion dollar company. With almost a billion users world wide, and a current estimated value of $80 billion dollars, that goal doesn’t seem quite as far fetched as it might sound.

The $80 billion puts them at half of Google’s value and just under a fifth of Apple’s value. Given that Google trades at five times its opening amount, things bode well for Facebook. If it can do what Apple has done over the past decade, then the company could pass the current world’s number one and find itself pretty close to one trillion.

All fun speculation, but just as we couldn’t help think of Groupon and Webvan in the same light, we can’t help but wonder where we are in the second Internet bubble and what path Facebook will take once they finally go public and have money in the bank. Will we see a similar outcome as AOL where they acquire a more traditional company only to years later be a standalone entity once again at a fraction of the size and value?

That’s the question now. Facebook clearly has incredibly lofty ambitions, but the track record for large, high-flying consumer Internet companies is spotty at best. We thought the answer was to continue to focus, like Google, on serving businesses.

The current trend is focusing more on consumers spending their time. It may or may not work. Perhaps the best thing it has done is to draw Google into a battle that can’t be won.

Cross-published at the DM Confidential blog.

When it comes to satisfaction, companies today are seeing their return on investment wane because consumers have now been taught to expect to be satisfied.

Marketers today need to connect with their customers beyond “satisfaction.” Emotionally connected consumers don’t just see their brands as providing good service or quality products, but as a means to more meaningful personal benefits in their own lives.

Achieving connection with consumers may be challenging for many companies. As marketers, we know higher connection impacts business performance.  And we’re envious of companies that do it well (think Apple or Nike).

And when consumers perceive brands as improving or changing their lives—making them feel happier, more successful or other personal connections–they are far more likely to buy more, pay more, stay loyal and become brand advocates.

For example, we recently surveyed consumers regarding the connections they have with 10 major retail brands. We found that consumers who felt an emotional connection to their retailers are four times more likely to shop those retailers first when needs arise, as compared to consumers who were simply satisfied with their retailers.

What’s more, connected consumers tend to recommend their favorite retailers to their friends and families—when consumers feel a connection to their retail brand, they are 50% more likely to advocate for that brand or recommend the retailer to others. And get this—emotionally connected customers are nearly six times more likely to have rated or blogged about their retail brands.

This kind of passion from customers separates brands that merely compete in a category from those that transcend. Again, think of the power of Apple’s fan base.

Of course, harnessing those connections is the hard part, and companies shouldn’t rush to replace satisfaction as a measurement because it’s still an important foundation for brands. But marketers should be looking at how to build connection and introduce the concept into their companies in ways that company operatives, agency creatives and C-level executives can all understand and act on.

By determining consumer connections, companies can help build and leverage those connections across their marketing programs and customer touch points to drive better results. The best way to help determine these connections is through connection intelligence that is actionable.

This means intelligence that:

• Identifies the connections that drive outcomes such as purchasing, loyalty, pricing and advocacy for your category;
• Provides current, high-quality data on your brand and competitors;
• Lets marketers hone in on the connections that most motivate specific target segments;
• Enables companies to apply connection to their marketing campaigns and programs, including TV, digital, social media, cross-sell and customer experience;
• Allows easy use and on-demand access to data.

Currently companies in a variety of categories such as financial services, electronics and retail are using a new generation of connection intelligence to help drive better performance for marketing campaigns.

For instance, a leading consumer electronics brand connected its products to what motivates the consumers in their lives and dramatically improved sales. A leading retailer is getting more from their seasonal events by building integrated in-store, online and advertising events around emotionally driven themes and winning more business from customers.

Connection drives brands. Isn’t it time to act on connection and move beyond satisfaction?

Of course, along the way there are victims of success that Steve Jobs and his crew have stepped on along the way to the top. Sometimes these victims are forced to innovate themselves, adapt or shut down.

A few weeks ago Apple sent the advertising world in a frenzy when it announced the deprecation of UDIDs in iOS5. However, confusion remains as to who this decision would really affect.

UDID stands for Unique Device Identifier. Every iPhone, iPod and iPad has a 40 character UDID used by developers to provide personalized preferences for individual users within games, provision apps for users outside of the app store, and is also used across the board for testing and optimization.

By deprecating UDIDs, Apple has given developers a warning that they may or may not remove UDIDs from future releases — as of iOS5 Beta 7, UDIDs still persist and no major changes are expected between now and the official release at the end of next week. For the near future, ad networks and publishers alike will continue to operate in the same fashion and leverage UDIDs for their respective purposes around advertising, scoreboards, etc.

1. Building Rich Profiles and Serving Targeted Ads: In the realm of online advertising, advertisers serve targeted ads by installing cookies on web browsers that measure audience behavior. Cookies installed on an online web browser are not limited to a single website but can anonymously follow a user across multiple websites, thereby building a rich user profile. Users benefit from cookies because they are served more relevant ads, while advertisers benefit by being able to target an audience that is more receptive to their ads.

Nonetheless, the user has the upper hand in this relationship as they can delete cookies at any point. Furthermore, the cookies are not shared by networks or publishers; they are only accessible to the platform that installs the cookies.

There are essentially two ways to serve ads on a mobile device — a) through the mobile web (aka web apps) and b) through mobile apps (aka native apps). If a user utilizes a web app, the website can generally utilize first-party cookies on the mobile phone.

Bump Equity’s Bob Walczak has written about how the uses for  first-party cookies are limited, as it can only be used across a single website. This means that when a user utilizes a mobile browser such as Apple’s Safari to search a website, the information transmitted by the cookie is “sandboxed” or limited to the user visiting the single website and cannot be linked with multiple websites. From an advertising perspective, this creates a very limited profile for serving relevant ads.

On the other hand, when a user downloads an app onto their phone, developers can install cookies in an app or they can transmit the device ID. Developers prefer utilizing the device ID because it is not limited to the specific app. According to Walczak, the device ID differs from a cookie on mobile in two significant ways: a) the device ID can share information with advertisers about all apps that a user has downloaded; and b) this information is shared by all parties who have access to the device ID, enabling advertisers to build a comprehensive user profile for serving relevant ads.

2. Measuring Conversions and Downloads: UDIDs are also utilized as a way to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign, including conversions and downloads.

Alternatives to the Device ID

Ad networks, exchanges and developers are collaborating to identify other ways to build user profiles for serving relevant ads. Some of the alternatives being discussed in the industry include:

Unique ID’s Intrinsic to Apps: Apple has asked developers to create unique identifiers that work specifically with apps to replace the phone UDID. This allows advertisers to target ads and build profiles within individual apps rather than across apps.

Utilizing a MAC Address: Another alternative is to utilize the MAC address. The MAC address alone could create the same concerns as the UDID but could be a solid short term solution.

Enabling Third-Party Cookies on Mobile: At present, iOS devices default to blocking third-party cookies. One possible solution would be for Apple to set the default on iOS 5 to enable third-party cookies. However, iOS 5 should give users the option to change default settings and delete cookies at any given time.

ODIN: The open device identification number (ODIN) is a number designed for mobile app developers and service providers to uniquely identify their users’ devices in a convenient and interoperable manner that is anonymous, consistent, and secure. ODIN leverages device identifiers in addition to the MAC address.

OFUDID: Open Feint’s single sign system for the game developer platform enables developers to analyze users across multiple games without UDID. The catch here is it requires the app to enable Open Feint’s platform which will be a solution only for mobile gaming.

Device fingerprinting: Blue Cava and Phluant mobile are a new breed of mobile analytics companies that are leveraging device idnetifiers to create anonymous audiences across devices and platforms. This is still early but definitely showing promise.

Targeting is reality. Educating consumers to the benefits of targeting is as important as targeting itself.As audience buying continues to grow for mobile advertisers, an emergence of RTB will become more and more important. RTB allows advertisers to break out of silos on specific apps and reach their specific audiences that will have the highest engagement rates.

Of course, to do that successfully the industry as a whole will need to work together and jump behind a solution that solves both short-term and long-term issues around audience identification. Apple has given the exploding mobile ecosystem a heads up to start looking and the industry has done a solid job of proactively responding.