iPad Whitepaper Insults Marketers’ Intelligence

An interesting white paper came out recently from Proximity Worldwide called "Marketer V Media – Can the iPad Save Traditional Media?" There’s some interesting stuff in it, so it’s worth a read, but you can tell the central problem with opus with the leading line, which reads:

"The iPad is the latest – and arguably most compelling – reason for marketers to back further away from traditional media companies and engage consumers directly."

While engaging consumers directly is definitely a tactic for marketers to embrace, the reality is that – with only 8.5 million iPads sold to date, worldwide, this is hardly the device to provide "reach." For reference, in 2008, Gartner estimated there were more than 1 billion PC’s installed worldwide.

Understand this: 8.5 million units to date is amazing, and it’s not likely to stop. We’re definitely in the place where you MUST be planning for the iPad. But putting all of your eggs in that basket right now would be likely putting on a Speedo in March when the weatherman says it’s going to be a gorgeous summer. We just aren’t there, yet, and yet this particular white-paper (hardly the first) makes no mention of market share or even market reality. Instead, it’s using the beauty of the iPad as a way to validate a market which hasn’t reached critical mass, yet.

I’ve been using an iPad about 50% of the time for the past two weeks, now, and I can say this: the problem with the iPad is that in many ways, it’s too good. It does what it does so well that it’s very easy – in fact, too easy – to just think of everything in terms of the iPad. And truth is – there’s a real potential that most of us will be using devices like this five years from now. But that’s not today, and your advertisers aren’t paying you for ROI tomorrow. And if you’re writing a whitepaper, I think you should know that.