Note to Media Industry: We're Not All Apple Fetishists

Helpfully enough, Condé Nast -- which has been very active in pushing out iPad apps for its magazines -- has put out a list of five best practices it recommends after studying use of the iPad in the first few months since its launch. There's lots of practical advice, but the most intriguing insight isn't as much about users as it is about the media elite's distorted view of Apple usage among the general public.

As the best practices make clear, it turns out the entire universe didn't jump on the iPad bandwagon while simultaneously clutching iPhones. Why? Because they didn't own one. As Scott McDonald, senior VP for market research at Condé Nast, told Advertising Age: "Even though we expected almost everybody to be already in the Apple family or be Apple cultists, that wasn't true. For a lot of people this was their first Apple device." This means that advertisers and publishers sometimes underdid giving users instructions in favor of a cleaner interface; they thought everyone already knew about quirky iPhone behaviors like "swiping, pinching and zooming."

Rather than this just being an example of an industry initially missing its market, it's about something more. The media and advertising worlds -- to put it mildly -- are full of not just Apple cultists, but Apple fetishists. It started with art directors, who have always been drawn not just to the software, but to the elegant design of the hardware it comes in, going back at least as far as the tangerine iMac pictured here. (In publishing, Apple fetishism was aided and abetted by the fact that the dominant publishing software is Quark, which at least started as a Mac-based program.)

Of course, Apple has only gotten better in the last few years at designing beautiful, functional products, which has only reinforced the fetish. Every time you see that line outside the Apple Store upon the release of the latest iPhone, you can bet that a high percentage of the people standing in it are from the communications industry. There's a direct, well, line between all of those people and the fact that, here in the early offing, much of the content being created for the iPad assumes too much knowledge of Apple products on the part of the user.

But when you take your eyes off the sleek design of your new Apple device -- stop looking! -- the reason the iPad would introduce so many people to Apple is pretty clear. In the other big markets in which Apple competes -- with the possible exception of the iPod -- there has always been a lot of competitive product. True, there's only one iPhone, but if you already have a phone -- and you don't want to switch to AT&T -- you might just stick with what you have. This isn't true of the iPad because it has created a whole new category. (No, Amazon's Kindle is too limited in what it offers to count.) There is no other device that lies somewhere in between a laptop and a smartphone.

Fortunately for those creating for the iPad, there's plenty of time to get things wrong and then right them. But the real news here is how well this bodes for Apple, which, in creating a new category, is also introducing its addictive products to people who've never experienced them before.

Related:

• People Breaks Ranks, Makes Its iPad App Free to Subscribers. Duh
• Note to Magazine Industry: Your iPad Apps Are Too Expensive
• Flipboard: More Proof That Magazines Are the iPad's Killer App
• iPad Paid Media Apps: Still Not Hot, But Maybe That's Good
• iPad/Paid Media Love Affair? Not At These Prices
• Apple's iPad a Print Savior? Three Reasons Why It's Not Even Close