It’s Thursday and we’re bringing you the digital week in review. Catch up on the biggest headlines in our recap below, and follow us on Twitter for insights all week long.

Jobs: Apple Has Inked More than $60MM in iAd Commitments for 2010

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers conference earlier this week, Steve Jobs announced that the company has signed mobile ad campaigns for several large brands, including AT&T, Best Buy and Chanel, among others. TechCrunch also reports that in just eight weeks, Apple has garnered more than $60 million in iAd commitments for 2010 – or half of all mobile advertising spend forecasted for the second half of the year (according to Apple).

Image via The First Post

The iAd platform will allow users to interact with ads from within an app – without disrupting their primary mode of engagement, whether that be playing a game or watching a video. The platform debuts in less than a month, on July 1.

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This week brought big news from Apple – first the public release of its new iPad tablet, and later an unveiling of the new iAd mobile advertising platform. Also making the headlines was a new report from the IAB and PriceWaterhouseCoopers that found that online advertising has surged back after losing steam last year. Read our complete roundup below.

Apple Unveils iAd Mobile Platform

On Thursday Steve Jobs announced iAd, Apple’s new mobile advertising platform. According to TechCrunch, Apple will sell and host the ads and share 60 percent of the revenue with developers. iAd placements will live within the mobile apps, and Jobs said developers can integrate them into their apps “in an afternoon.”

“If you click on an ad now, you’re yanked out of your app. As a result, people don’t click on ads,” Jobs said at the iPhone developer preview event. “We have figured out how to do interactive and video content without ever taking you out of the app.”

Jobs demo-ed ads for Toy Story 3 and Nike, which incorporated interactive elements like games, location services and even iPhone accelerometer tool. He added that since the average user spends a half-hour each day interacting with apps, there is a tremendous opportunity for app advertisers to “deliver interaction” and also “emotion.”

Thanks to iAd, we can expect to see far more ad-supported applications across Apple’s devices now that Apple’s providing its own ad platform for creating ads. Yet advertisers have been able to create application ads for about as long as there have been iPhone apps through networks such as AdMob, Medialets and VideoEgg. With 85 million iPhone apps and iPod Touches already sold, and 4 billion apps downloaded – all before the iPad debuted – there’s room for several competitors, and many popular apps have little to no advertising to date.

iAd will likely compel all networks, agencies, marketers, and developers to provide richer experiences and better data. Meanwhile, with Apple doubling down on support of HTML 5 for creating the ads, it will create more fragmentation in the short-term but could lead to broader adoption on Apple’s standards – potentially not just for Apple’s devices but for mobile applications running on other mobile operating systems.

Read more insights from 360i over at Ad Age.

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