With the expected launch of the Apple Watch a few months away, mobile advertising company, TapSense, has announced the launch of a programmatic ad platform for the wearable from Apple Inc. The platform will combine interactive ads with ‘hyper-local’ targeting and leverage Apple Pay in an attempt to increase conversion.

The platform caters to both developers and brands with an SDK for app developers and programmatic APIs for brands, agencies and marketers who want to monetize their content on the Apple Watch.

TapsSense believes Apple Watch presents an opportunity to finally say goodbye to banner ads and serve up brand experiences optimized for increasingly shrinking screen sizes.

“While most of our competitors are focused on banner ads and legacy platforms, we are focused on innovation and next generation platforms. Apple Watch has the potential to be a category disruptor similar to iPod or iPhone and we believe that it provides great opportunities for brands and developers to deliver engaging experiences to consumers,” said Ash Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of TapSense.

The TapSense platform makes use of the GPS on an iPhone connected to an Apple Watch to serve up ‘hyper-local’ targeted ads such as store coupons. Location based targeting in mobile advertising is nothing new, but TapSense thinks that because the Apple Watch is already on a user’s wrist, and not kept in a pocket or handbag like a mobile phone, the device is more accessible and consumers should more readily interact with ads.

The platform further aims to deliver more engaging ads –compared to traditional banner ads— to Apple Watch through interactive interfaces supported by Apple WatchKit such as watch faces, glances & full-screen capabilities.

“For an iOS developer, Apple WatchKit provides familiar tools and APIs as well as exciting new user interactions such as Glances and Force Push. Developing an app for the watch is the same as writing any iOS extension,” said Amit Manjhi, Co-Founder & CTO of TapSense.

TapSense also hopes that Apple Watch’s integration with Apple Pay will provide added benefits for advertisers on its platform since it will allow consumers to instantly redeem hyper-local coupons directly from their Apple Watch.

It remains to be seen how successful Apple Watch itself will be, with some polls indicating only 5 percent of people are interested in buying one, but at least those that do buy one won’t miss out on their favorite mobile ads.

Image courtesy of TapSense