On the morning of Thursday, March 6th, Apple announced their release of the iPhone and iPod touch developers SDK. What this opens up is 3rd party development of native applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. This update along with a host of new and related features is set to release in June.

What does this mean for advertising? Well, with every new, ground-breaking advancement in technology, and every new way to push that invention to its limits brings room for new ideas. Mobile marketing is a young and growing form of advertising. What this new SDK means is new advertising opportunities in the future.

Some of you may be familiar with in-Game advertisements and their success with such platforms as Second Life and integration in console games such as those produced by EA Sports. There will be games, among other programs developed for this new technology and you will see that forward thinking companies, and design shops will be embracing this and leading the way in the new form of mobile advertising. You can bet that CP+B will find a new way to implement this for their current and future clients.

How can I see this being a viable use in the future for any one of our clients? Well, here’s one simple idea used for 2 different clients.

First, lets take the fast food restaurant industry. How can we use this new technology and platform and use it for advertising and brand retention for them? Lets say that we create a native application for the iPhone that is a restaurant locator which pulls from a chain’s location database and stores the store address, phone number, a store photo, monthly specials, etc. and delivers all that information to our consumer’s pocket? What’s more? How about using the iPhone’s built in Google mapping system, the same one that uses road maps, driving conditions, and satellite aerial photography and using the triangulation feature to locate where the user is located and showing the surrounding restaurant chain locations with instant turn by turn directions from where they are to the restaurant?

How can this same concept apply to other industries? How about baking? Any bank could easily implement this to locate branches and bank friendly ATMs. Bank of America, the Nation’s most popular banking choice has already built an iPhone friendly version of their on-line banking site for mobile use. Of their mobile banking Apple iPhone makes up 25% of their mobile banking usage. This number speaks volumes for the phone, and it’s potential especially since the phone hasn’t even been available for a year yet.

Just think of how this exciting new platform will open opportunities for every industry and the ways that we can advertise, market and sell our client’s products, services and brands.

Take a look at Apple’s Keynote Speech and be impressed for yourself.