iOS ads in your camera roll

Lately, I’ve been thinking more about advertising and creative campaigns. This is partly due to my affinity for iconic ads as well as some new work my agency has taken on (more on that in the months ahead). Poorly executed ads are the worst. However, good ads are iconic and have the power to shape and inform how a brand is perceived.

A director I’ve recently been obsessed with is Tom Kuntz. He’s the mind behind the absurd mid-2000 Skittles campaigns as well as the FedEx Pigeon Super Bowl spot. Both campaigns are iconic in different ways.

In the past decade with the rise of social media, advertising has fundamentally changed. Since the media we consume has fractured, different types of content appeal to increasingly niche audiences. Traditional digital ads (think banner ads) don’t perform as well.

Regardless, people pay to run ads. I’ve done it lately with my app, Stompers. This all got me thinking… what if Apple supported ads within their photo app?

I can imagine the immediate and visceral backlash to this. At the same time, if the ads were heavily informed by the context of the user I could see this being an interesting approach. This would be hard to build as you’d be reversing the expectation of a free camera.

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