Steve Jobs Talks iAds and the Nissan Leaf Electric Car

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Nissan is set to release the latest in their fleet — a 100% electric vehicle called the Leaf.

At the recent Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference Steve Jobs unveiled the new iAd for the Nissan Leaf and goes through the motions to the point where he apparently orders one for himself.

What’s cool about how they are advertising the Leaf is that this will be one of the first vehicles promoted using the iAds platform on the iPhone. The HTML5 compatible video and interface seem as cool as Flash, but is obviously more browser compliant and will play on mobile devices.

The ad is triggered and displayed in the iPhone app, so there is no longer the cumbersome application switching and re-switching that previously occurred with the iPhone app advertising provided by the now Google owned AdMob.

What I like about these ads are their interactivity. Jobs illustrates this using a graph that shows how far the Leaf will travel on $1 worth of electricity versus other popular cars on 1$ of gas. The result is comical particularly when comparing a Nissan Leaf to a Hummer.

The landscape of advertising is changing and the ability to provide a high level of engagement and interactivity in ads is going to be crux to the future of advertising. No longer will it be enough just to put an advertisement in a consumer’s face, rather, it will be necessary to involve them in the process and make them a part of the product. As always these days engagement is key.

The world is a changin’.