After the news of a massive 1.5 mln T-Mobile G1 phones sold in pre-order, AdWeek has recently reported that Google is going to offer iPhone-specific Web advertisement that will allow the company to profit from the Apple device as well as the company's own Android platform, in an effort to monetize the peculiar way Web pages are being displayed on the iPhone.

Unlike any other smart phone, the iPhone does in fact display the full Web page to visitors, allowing them to then tap on the screen to zoom on a specific area. Unfortunately for webmasters, who are often relying on a click-based advertising campaign, this means that visitors can easily get around advertisement and ignore it completely, which makes monetizing their website content significantly harder and iPhone visitors a missed opportunity.

While Google's new product doesn't cope specifically with the matter of ad formats, it does open up the way for much more relevant advertisement that iPhone visitors might be interested in, by allowing advertisers to target iPhone users specifically and, therefore, to offer content that appeals and integrates more with the unique device capabilities of the phone, such as one-click dialing or Maps integration. AdWeek speculates on the topic:

"American Airlines could use the new Google option to change a search ad from a call to action to click to one driving a phone call to reservations. Or the ad could highlight the airline’s iPhone-optimized site for booking flights."

It has to be noted that Google isn't the first company to come up with advertisement targeted specifically to mobile Internet devices: in fact, AOL announced a very similar program just little over a month ago which was aimed at exploiting the full potential of a market that is now counting over ten million active users and growing.

Other less-known companies such as JumpTap and

AdMob are also specialized in serving ads specifically to mobile users, allowing one-click purchases of songs, videos and other media, as well as applications from the App Store in the case of the iPhone. AdMob also offers site-specific solutions for Facebook and internal site search advertising. In short, this market seems to be facing an unprecedented growth that will end up making the desktop and the mobile advertising worlds converge more and more.

Google's latest update in its advanced ad technology, currently offered in beta to a limited number of advertisers involved, is capable of recognizing when the HTTP request is being sent from the mobile version of Apple's Safari, and will behave as a gateway allowing advertising to refine targeting even more. But, unlike AOL's program, Google engineers might eventually get this new feature to work on all mobile devices, a market in which, despite its positive sales figures, the iPhone still represent a relatively small fraction.

Google only released this brief statement as a response to a media inquiry from AlleyInsider.com:

"As part of our ongoing commitment to help advertisers more effectively reach their target audience, Google is currently testing a feature that gives advertisers more control over how their ads will appear on mobile devices with full Internet browsers, like the iPhone. This feature is currently in a limited beta with a small number of advertisers."

There hasn't been any official statement on Google's blog yet, and the news is coming directly from some of the advertisers that have managed to enter the beta stage of the program, which is likely to be rolled out to the entire AdWords platform in the coming months.

While Google's Mobile Ads product is already targeting the 405 million and growing mobile Internet users around the world, WAP phones in particular, this latest update features the iPhone specifically as a platform advertisers might want to exploit to its full potential, taking a much more thorough control over the actions visitors can undertake and increasing the ad interactivity and response rate.