Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

In class, you all may remember that I posed some questions about Google's Enhanced Campaigns for AdWords that will be fully rolled out by July 22, 2013.  Here is a recent article from Search Engine Watch that I found about it entitled, July 22, 2013: AdWords Apocalypse or Simple Technology Upgrade?.

As the article notes, all advertisers will be forced over to Enhanced Campaigns on July 22 if they don't convert on their own prior to that date.  Currently in Adwords, advertisers have the option to advertise on desktops (which includes laptops), tablets, mobile devices, or any combination of the three.  With Enhanced Campaigns, tablets will be seen like desktops (i.e., bids/keywords used for desktop advertising will also be used for tablets) and advertisers will be forced into mobile but they will have the option to increase/decrease what they bid based on a percentage of what they are bidding for desktop (i.e., if you bid $10 for a given keyword on desktop and set your mobile percentage to 60%, you'll be bidding $6 for that keyword in mobile).

Based on some conversations I've had, advertisers can choose to set their percentage low enough that they can essentially stay out of the mobile channel if they prefer it.  If that's true, I suppose advertisers will not be obligated to advertise in mobile but it seems awfully inefficient when advertisers already have the option to simply not create campaigns for the mobile channel.  It seems like Google may be doing this to kick-start adoption of the mobile/tablet channels, but this seems like a pretty unfair price to advertisers that may not want to be in those channels (consider a company that it is advertising an app that only works on Apple devices  -- perhaps part of Google's motivation is to make sure developers begin writing apps for all devices including their own Android devices).

This seems counter to some of the moves Google has made in the past, enabling geographic targeting at a very granular level, language targeting etc. (some of the things we learned in class).  I imagine more active advertisers are not going to like this lack of device flexibility.  It would not surprise me at all if at some point (after Google has converted all advertisers to mobile and tablet channels), that Google again allows advertisers to opt in/out of devices) as I suspect advertisers will demand it.