Widgets

Commenting for iMedia Connection, Chris Autry suggests that it's time to rethink online display ads -- a "push" format that guarantees a lot of potential viewers won't welcome them. What does offer promise, he suggests, are what we call widgets, but what he calls "advertising as applications." That's an insightful encapsulation for a "pull" ad format that offers consumers value they associate with the advertising brand.

Coke may not have found its winning online formula, but that hasn't stopped it from trying. Efforts have included promotions on YouTube to send video holiday cards, a promotional stint on Second Life and an ongoing virtual world called CC Metro. It also has rolled out three more Facebook applications, including a nightlife-themed app, Burn Alter Ego, to promote its energy drink sold in the U.K.

A Chumby is a standalone internet device that uses a wireless connection to run favorite widgets. You can have it play videos, display RSS feeds, devote it to casual gaming or reporting the weather ... whatever a widget can do. One suspects in short order they will display lots of video promos.

Advertisers constantly are looking for the most effective way of engaging targeted audiences with their brands' messages, while publishers are looking for a fresh way to monetize their content and market their brands. By pairing advertising with high quality syndicated content in a widget application, advertisers are able to reach an audience that is very relevant and involved with contextual content.

Call them widgets, gadgets, or wadgets, but businesses such as Kraft Foods, Nissan, and American Express are building brand identity using these software applications that can be embedded in a Web page or downloaded to a computer desktop. At Yahoo Widgets, there are nearly 4,700 widgets, including 86 widgets tagged "shopping."

Do not doubt the power of the widget, which can be a quite the versatile marketing tool. In Los Angeles, KCAL airs Lakers games. With the sponsorship of the Carl's Jr. burger chain, it has released on its website 16 widgets for Laker fans -- scoreboards, chat windows, cheerleader links, and so on. The SportsTop-created dashboard thus manages to simultaneously promote the station and its personalities, the basketball team, and a food franchise. That's a pretty fair return for your widget dollar.

It's not like the new Indiana Jones movie needs additional buzz. But you just can't make too many millions, I always say. For the release of the upcoming film's second trailer, Clearspring has created a widget called "Skull." And just to guarantee its wild viral spread, the two fans who distribute the most Skull widgets to their online friends and neighbors will win a trip to the movie's premiere. They'll perform as red carpet correspondents -- with the resulting footage streaming to the very widgets that brought them.

Online advertising makes enough money that it's doing a lot of things right. But the fly in the ointment is the very same one afflicting television, radio and billboards: how do you get viewers to notice? Israel's PredictAd thinks it has an answer in its new PredictAdPlus program--a local site search engine that returns ad results right as you type in your search terms. Among the auto-complete search suggestions that pop-up, so does a contextual ad link-right where your eyes are engaged. A pretty clever idea. For now it's all text, but video's the obvious next step.

The AvantLink Affiliate network announced the release of their Video Ad Tool (VAT), a network-integrated tool for the Affiliate space. Merchants simply upload marketing videos  through their program/campaign management interface, and AvantLink distributes the creative to Affiliates through a "Video" tagged ad type.