Why You Need to Really Care About Touchscreens

I read a book a while back called "Close to the Machine." Honestly, it wasn't all that great. The writing was clunky, the main point of the book was pretty slow in coming, and it relied way too much on the author's personal experience. But, it was a really good look inside the minds of people who were working deep in technology. The book was published in 1997, so this was really pretty early on, when not everyone was spending all of their time with a computer.

The one thing that I took away from the book (and still think about) was an underlying theme that is really summarized in the title itself: people who have really adopted technology want to be just that - "close to the machine." That is, people tend to get frustrated by the limitations of the tools that we need to manipulate the technology and power inside a computer. We want to do away with mice and keyboards and drawing tables and whatever else we need to get our ideas out of our heads and into the machine. We want to be close.

That was a concept held only by a minority of people back in 1997, but it was prescient. As more people used more computers, we all got that feeling. And just in time, the technology has really begun to allow for that, thanks to the proliferation of touchscreen technology.

This rise is due, in part, because most of the patents for touchscreen technology have expired, meaning that manufacturers don't have to worry about paying royalties or license fees. Additionally, of course, processor power has become advanced enough and powerful enough to handle the inputs from touchscreens.

But no matter what the reason, touchscreens have taken off, and marketers using interactive technology to communicate with consumers need to start thinking of what this might mean.

Touchscreens: More than Half of All Devices

Millennial Media (a mobile advertising platform) publishes a regular report on the mobile market place. Among the many gems (seriously) inside of its report is a breakdown of traffic by input device type. As of July, 54 percent of devices had touchscreens. In second place were QWERTY devices with just 26 percent. Considering that iPad traffic has been growing at 300 percent month over month, we are beginning to see that a new generation of trafficking is emerging.

This appears to be a pretty good thing. It seems that people using the iPad, in particular, are extraordinarily engaged and represent a significant opportunity for engagement. According to data from Mobclix (another mobile platform), ads on the iPad that use video have 10.7 times higher click-through rate than regular iPad ads. Anecdotally, we hear that ads in general on the iPad perform way better than traditional ads.

Of course, there's a really good reason to believe that this has more to do with novelty than with actual usefulness: people who have touchscreens are into the fact that they have touchscreens, so they are willing to play with anything. But that's a mistake. We're used to expecting new things to spike and then fade. That's not the case with touchscreens.

But the proliferation of the devices will not. Apple seems to be doubling down on its touchscreen investments with a mouse and a trackpad that use touch technology to drive desktops. And we are destined to see more tablets this year from BlackBerry, HP, Dell, and more. By next year...