Apple CEO Steve Jobs seems intent on bludgeoning everyone to submission with his love-it-or-leave-it attitude to mobile. First it was the tight girdle around applications and now it?s his diktats on mobile advertising.

Quite clearly, Mr. Jobs is taking advertising agencies, application developers, ad networks and advertisers on this rollercoaster ride, making each descent more frightening than the other. Does he know something that mobile marketers don?t?

Last week?s announcement that Apple was offering for $10 million first-mover advantage to brands to debut with the first in-application campaign on the new iAd mobile network (see story) stunned most observers of mobile advertising. Such chutzpah, many muttered.

Numbers game
Well, if truth be told, Apple is doing mobile advertising a favor ? even if it?s a backhanded compliment.

The computer giant has dared to put a number out there when other agencies and mobile marketers tiptoed around budgetary allocations.

Unless mobile gets the seven- and eight-digit budgets as a matter of course, the medium will never be considered seriously or as a peer of more established channels such as the wired Web, print or television.

So, in a way, Mr. Jobs is doing what agencies should have been doing: making a strong case for mobile advertising by convincing marketers to put their money where the mouth is.

Nike is said to be a strong contender for the debut iAd advertising effort. Let?s hope it?s the case.

When a Fortune 500 brand steps up to the plate and acknowledges that mobile is key to its consumer marketing strategy, it sends a strong message to other players in the apparel and accessories space as well as big ad spenders in consumer packaged goods, automotive, retail, entertainment, travel and fast food.

Tributary streams
Mobile advertising and marketing has too long been the hostage of big talk and small spend. It doesn?t make sense to trot out those fantastic numbers on the number of subscribers and applications launched and those able to receive SMS messages and those with smartphones.

And yet most mobile marketers are silent on the two numbers that matter: metrics and budgets.

Apple has thus far kept mum on metrics, other than to ban third parties from analyzing its advertising data. Which again is the wrong way to go, but who?s to pressure Steve Jobs when Google?s Eric Schmidt and Microsoft?s Bill Gates have failed?

Analysts and industry observers have criticized Apple for not being a team player. It is true. Apple rarely attends non-Mac conventions, rarely offers speakers for trade shows and rarely deigns to return press calls.

The brand, it would seem, cares a jot about what its peers think of it. This company marches to its own drumbeat, playing different scores along the way that seem cloying to competition and pundits.  

Well, whatever its market strategy, it seems to be working for Apple. Consumers are buying its products in droves. Application developers are bending backwards to appease 1 Infinite Loop. And media are totally besotted with every utterance, rumor or product from this company.

Now all eyes are on advertisers and agencies: Who will blink and pay $10 million as the first tribute?