To understand the value of using widgets in your rich media advertising campaigns, let’s first define what a “widget” is. For the purpose of an advertising campaign, widgets are applications with valuable or sharable content such as audio, video, games and animation and, to the user, are most interesting or valuable when that content changes or gets dynamically updated.
Examples of widgets are everywhere these days, such as those featuring live video feeds to events or those with new daily games or audio. Advertisers can distribute online widgets to audiences via a website, a rich media advertisement or even via another widget. Their inherent value lies in the fact that they keep the user continually connected to the advertiser. Widgets become even more valuable to advertisers when users are able to easily grab them and showcase them externally: in their blogs, their websites or perhaps, most compellingly, in their personal social networking spaces. This allows users to share and showcase their affinity for specific brands, products and causes.
Today’s most successful rich media and video ad campaigns allow users to engage, interact and then get rewarded; creative that features widget-sharing successfully accomplishes all three of these goals. Yet despite the popularity of widgets, many advertisers still do not understand how they work, how they can be measured and, most importantly, how they can be leveraged to improve results for the associated rich media campaigns. Applications with viral aspects are not new to the industry — many of the most successful campaigns have included some sort of viral aspect — but giving active target audiences the opportunity to display and share this content from within their own online venues is a new trend that deserves special attention. Widgets give advertisers a fresh new way to connect to their audience and build loyalty as well as a streamlined approach to measure and report on this viral behavior.
The payoff
Once the user encounters their first widget-equipped online ad and sees how easy it is to post this compelling digital content to virtually any social network profile or blog (e.g., Facebook, MySpace or Blogger), they may fill their sites with widgets of their favorite products or causes.
The benefits are two-fold: the advertiser’s message is automatically experienced more frequently by more loyal audiences, and simultaneously by more relevant audiences, as the widgets are voluntarily posted to sites or profiles that users have a personal relationship with, such as a coworker’s blog or a friend’s profile.
Another payoff for users is that these widgets allow them to “wear” brands or causes as a “badge” — a way of defining and reflecting who they are to their peers. In these “green” days, a user might embrace a widget of an environmentally-friendly cause or company, which allows them to reinforce their online identity as one who truly cares.
This kind of in-depth behavioral information can be leveraged to optimize future online ad efforts. For example, you can prioritize social networking sites to appear first in your widget option list, so that you are encouraging posting to those sites first. Or you can optimize the ad widget and experience toward a particular audience’s profile and preferences. And remember, as you design the creative to show off your widget for download, the closer you put the “grabbing” functionality to the first interaction, the more embeds/downloads you will get. Always make it clear and easy.
Widget campaigns are also a fantastic fit for entertainment clients who might have high-profile content, such as movie trailers, which have some repeat value for viewing or for forwarding to friends. Naturally some of these may have a shorter lifetime on the user’s profile, so it is best to provide a dynamic element to the widget, such as a countdown clock that displays how long the movie or trailer will be available.
The wonderful world of widgets features a wealth of opportunities for online advertisers, and today’s top rich media providers like the company I work for, EyeWonder, are making the technology behind all of this easier than ever for advertisers to leverage. Additional verticals and brands are reaching outside of the box to try something new, and successes are continuing to manifest in ways that weren’t originally envisioned. Successful widget-based ad campaigns engage, interact and reward the user, and technologies and tactics that continue to enable advertisers to meet or exceed expectations are sure to stay at the forefront of the online advertising world.
This is a new take on the green initiative. I can see some people always using this site to make purchase decisions. It makes for an interesting demographic, and a new/revised category of psychographics (the green group). This initiative grows every day, even MSN has added a green section, just like their sports or entertainment sections.
Evo Connects Green Businesses with Jaded Buyers
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Kermit is right. It’s not easy being green. For spiritual Kermits, Evo has arrived — to help green-leaning consumers make shopping decisions by making eco-friendly alternatives easily accessible. The site covers everything from food and clothes, to housewares and solar panels. The site’s business model depends primarily on affiliate revenue: it only gets paid when it makes a connection between buyer and seller, CEO Dan Siegel told TreeHugger. Evo partners with countless small and medium green sellers, amounting to over 2 million products and services on the site. Every product includes a green evaluation based on a painstaking rating system that takes into account what the item is made from, how it is produced, the distance it traveled to reach the consumer, and what type of energy powers it, reports PSFK. The site is also supported by user reviews. With these efforts in place, consumers won’t be tricked into products that only claim to be green, a tactic Siegel refers to as “greenwashing.” |
Top 10 US Social Network and Blog Site Rankings Issued for Oct.
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MySpace.com again crowns rankings of top US social networking sites, with more than 58.8 million unique visitors in October, according to custom lists of top US social networking sites and blogs compiled by Nielsen Online, reports MarketingCharts. Google’s Blogger remains atop blog site rankings, with 34.1 million visitors. Ranked second among social networking sites, Facebook increased its number of visitors to 19.5 million, up 125 percent vs. Oct. ‘06. MySpace visitors increased 19 percent year over year.
The top 2 social networks’ number of visitors increased from September, whereas those ranked 3rd through 4th decreased visitor numbers slightly from the previous month. (Compare with Sept. social network data.) Among blog sites, top-ranked Blogger increased visitors 58 percent from the year-earlier period, reaching 34.1 million visitors.
More impressively, however, WordPress moved up the rankings to No. 2, having grown a whopping 444 percent compared with the year-earlier period. It accounted for 11.4 million visitors, up from 2.1 million last year. Six Apart’s Type Pad, dropping to No. 3, also grew 20 percent to nearly 10.6 million visitors in October. (See this table to make month-to-month [Sept. '07 vs. Oct. '07] comparisons for blog sites.) |
Tia sent me a link to this piece in AdWeek about how the University of California at Berkeley is now using YouTube to “air” segments, or entire semesters, of courses.
I love this quote so I’m pasting it up here verbatim:
“For YouTube, it further legitimizes their role in society because it is not just for idiots who want to put their latest party video online,” says Andy Bateman, CEO of Interbrand, New York. “It is about real substantial, useful interactive content. Berkeley is the first, so run the camera forward five years when every university is posting their curriculum and the students are spending even more time on YouTube. You have more eyeballs for more time being engaged in YouTube’s content, and that has to be good for business.”
There are a million reasons why this is a step in the right direction. Aside from the ability to dramatically increase enrollments for colleges/universities in addition to provide convenient, effecient and effective ways of providing an education for those who are interested, there’s also the possibility to advertise to a laser-specific audience here. Want to sell more external hard drives, organizers or Taco Bell? Who better than someone glued to a monitor at 10PM?
Filed under: Trends
So, I’m reading this article on five emerging consumer trends and one of them just looks WAY too bizarre to believe – even for me!
The rationale behind this so-called trend is that with the proliferation and low cost of entry to luxury items, the tastemakers of today are seeking out the bland in everything. In other words, since just about all hotels now offer awesome beds, high-speed internet, spas, pools, cool bars/restaurants, etc, the cool people are now heading to the out of the way, dive-ish, bland and drab places…
Brian Pillsbury, manager of the Howard Johnson LaGuardia: “It took us a couple of months to figure out why we were suddenly seeing occupancy rates of 85%, and why our lobby was crowded with well-heeled European visitors. We’re obviously loving this trend, and are even contemplating placing ads on hipster sites like The Coolhunter, Springwise and Josh Spear.”
Are olive green refrigerators and horrible vinyl kitchen floors next? I should’ve saved all my Garanimals clothes so that my unborn kids could be on the vanguard of fashion!
UPDATE: Went back to trendwatching.com again today, and they’ve admitted these five trends were bogus…Thank God! I was about to move all of my savings into polyester futures…
