Yahoo CEO claims iAd service will ‘fall apart’

In an interview with Reuters, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made disparaging remarks about Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising service. Bartz criticized Apple’s strategy of controlling the content of and producing early ads, saying, “That’s going to fall apart for them. Advertisers are not going to have that type of control over them. Apple wants total control over those ads.” A Wall Street Journal report from August indicated that one announced launch partner—Chanel SA—backed out of the service, and that new ads were taking between eight to ten weeks to create, and sometimes two weeks longer than expected for Apple to build the actual ads themselves, due to the company’s tight control over the creative process and the ad agencies’ learning curves.