Advertising on the Apple Watch

I was gifted a brand new Apple Watch recently and started thinking about the advertising capabilities of the device. On one hand, the small interface makes advertisements very intrusive and distracting. The ads would need to take up the whole space in order to be even legible. Normal placement methods would not work very well. On the other hand, the device's hyper localization and fitness use cases present a lot of opportunities. The Apple Watch is also connected to the iPhone, which provides a wealth of data to utilize.

To no surprise, a company has already created an application to that enables personalization based on location that has been around since 2015. TapSense makes ads as relevant based on current phone usage metrics and motions on the iPhone to close ads in a non-intrusive way. It seems the company has not been successful, however, with the website down and not much growth since 2015, according to Crunchbase. 

In fact, with Apple's move to limit IDFA data usage on apps such as Facebook for iOS14, it will be even harder to place ads on Apple Watch, since they are both highly connected. The implications of reduced ads both increases user experience, though I think in the short run. No more intrusive ads during normal usage are definitely a plus. In the long term, however, the lack of ads could limit developer incentives to build on the platform, and decrease a potentially lucrative revenue stream. These counteracting forces would keep the Apple Watch in its current niche category of primarily being a fitness device. Maybe that is the intention and for the best?