Update: iAd Producer has been discontinued by Apple, so despite being full of great info, I’d recommend not reading this book!

In 2012 Ben wrote iAd Production: A Beginner’s Guide, an exercise driven book on iAd design, development and deployment. iAd Production focuses heavily on iAd Producer, an app from Apple that allows drag and drop iAd creation.

What is iAd?

Think of an iAd as a micro-app contained within an app, on a user’s iPhone or iPad, that they’ve downloaded from the App Store. When the user taps your advert’s banner, it bursts into life, filling the entire screen of their device.

How will you learn to make an iAd?

iAd Beginner’s Guide takes you from start to finish of building rich, compelling, and interactive iAds. You will learn to create beautiful multi-page ads with store finders, social sharing, 3D images, and video galleries.

You will create ads that utilise the powerful technologies in the iPhone and iPad to increase your brand awareness. Once you have engaged the user, you can carry out targeted advertising campaigns with location-based coupons, store finders, and social engagement. Using the iTunes Store, you will see how it’s even possible to add one-click digital content purchasing, right within your ad. Learn how iAd producer manages all the HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 behind your iAd. You will be creating emotive, gripping, and effective mobile advertising campaigns in no time.

What’s in the book?

Chapter 1, Getting Started with iAd, introduces you to iAd, the immersive mobile advertising platform from Apple. We’ll look at what an iAd is, why they’re awesome, and the underlying technologies they’re written in.

Chapter 2, Preparing Your Content, shows the best techniques to get the most out of your media content, by optimising it for mobile display and delivery.

Chapter 3, Making Your iAd, shows you how to install iAd Producer—the tool from Apple that allows us to make rich iAds. With drag-and-drop simplicity and step-by-step examples, we’ll create our first demo iAd!

Chapter 4, Making Sure it Works, shows you how to test your ads on the device, or in the iOS Simulator, if you don’t have access to the required hardware.

Chapter 5, Templates and Objects, presents the benefits and limitations of a large selection of templates and objects as we build another example iAd, using a range of the pre-built templates and objects in iAd Producer.

Chapter 6, iAd destinations, shows you how to use the core of our ad to engage our user and induce them to perform an action, such as sharing your brand with a friend via email or downloading your digital content from the iTunes Store.

Chapter 7, Building for the Big Screen, shows you how to build more immersive iAds for the iPad. With its large multi-touch screen, we’ll make an ad with even richer interactivity that’ll work exclusively on the iPad.

Chapter 8, Creating interactive Ads, teaches you how to modify the JavaScript code that powers our iAd by adding simple code snippets to enhance our ad with dynamic SMS/e-mail sharing and calendar events, to keep engaging the user with your brand after they’ve left your advertisement.

Chapter 9, Managing a Successful iAd Campaign, presents the best ways to manage a successful iAd campaign, adding tracking analytics into our ad, measuring user insights, and the targeting options available, to ensure you reach the ideal target audience.

Chapter 10, Adding iAds into your App, teaches you how to add iAd into an existing application, to begin generating revenue, and intelligently animate banners in and out of view, depending on their availability.

Chapter 11, Tracking revenue and Fallbacks, shows you how to integrate additional ad solutions when the iAd Network doesn’t have an available banner in its inventory. Finally, you’ll learn how to analyze the number of ads your app is displaying, and more importantly, how much you’re earning!

What you’ll need to get started

You’ll need to be a member of the iOS Developer program and have a Mac running Snow Leopard, OS 10.6 or later. We’ll look at getting or updating a Mac and joining the iOS Developer program in the first chapter. It’ll be useful to have an iPhone or iPad to test on, but isn’t vital as you’ll learn how to preview your ads without a device.

Is this book for you?

This book is for brands, advertisers, and developers who want to create compelling and emotive iAd advertisements that generate revenue and increase brand awareness. You don’t need previous experience of creating adverts or apps for iPhone and iPad, as you’ll be taken through the entire process of making motion-rich, beautiful ads.

Available on Amazon

Or direct from the publisher in print or eBook at: http://www.packtpub.com/iad-production-for-ios-devices-beginners-guide/book

If you want to check out a chapter before you buy: Sample: Chapter 3 – Making your iAd [PDF]