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Mediasmith Anvil |
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Volume 7, Issue
5
October 30, 2008 |
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Don’t
Spoil Your Widget Campaign |
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By David
Smith and Elizabeth Heldenbrand Editor’s Note: This
article first appeared in iMediaConnection’s Desktop Apps Marketing
Channel. We have added an additional
Mediasmith case study to the article. To view the original article go to www.imediaconnection.com Widgets
reflect the evolving digital media landscape and these tiny applications
enable marketers to break through the clutter. But only the smart widget
marketers will survive. Don’t
let their size fool you. These tiny, web-enabled applications are changing
the way we consume content, and, in a very big way. The
earliest form of widgets dates back to the early 1980s, with the introduction
of Apple’s Mac OS with Desk Accessories. These were simple desktop
applications that ran in their own windows -- calculator, calendar, clock,
notepad and games, to name a few. In the mid-1990s, My Yahoo introduced
customizable start pages with web-enabled news, weather, sports scores, and
other content delivered to its members from across the Yahoo network. Fast
forward to the 21st century, web-enabled applications known as
widgets (or gadgets, if you prefer the Google term; applications if you
prefer the Facebook term) now live on the desktop in customizable start pages
such as My Yahoo and iGoogle, and they are thriving within social networking
sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Widgets are also gaining traction on
mobile devices, but it is within their online environment that they are
making the greatest impact. As many
marketers know, the media environment has become increasingly fragmented, yet
full of opportunity; TV ratings are far lower on average, yet flat in
aggregate. Consumers are taking control of their media consumption, and in
the process becoming increasingly savvy and more advertising averse. On the
flip side, this has opened a window of opportunity for advertisers and
agencies to develop innovative technologies and techniques to align with this
change in media consumption. The primary change is that consumers are much
more involved with their media consumption -- to the point that they are not
so much consuming their experience, but rather programming it. In this
digital world, we must learn to be less intrusive, to abide by the
consumer’s rules and operate on their own terms if we want to succeed.
Widgets represent one small, yet powerful opportunity marketers are employing
to do just that. How so? Here are some key points to consider about widgets
and their marketing potential:
Essentially,
anything that can be found on the internet can be “widgetized.”
But be careful to follow point #2. If you build it, they won’t
necessarily come or even stay. |
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Mediasmith Morsel Advertising in a down market: At Mediasmith, we believe the evidence is
overwhelming: maintaining a strong advertising presence in a down market can
turn the tide for you and your business. This has been proven in every down
market since the Great Depression (see links to studies below). Major changes
in category leadership have often happened during such periods. The ones who
lose in challenging times are the ones who regard advertising as a variable
expense rather than as an investment. Support for this can be found in
these articles: How
brands thrived during the Great Depression IBM (IBM): The
Recession’s First Recession-Proof Company Why
should you increase your advertising budget in a recession? How
to Survive Crash: Spend More on Ads Contact a manager at Mediasmith
if you need more help on this important topic. |
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So what’s the big deal? Recent
data from comScore Widget Metrix shows
that widgets have a 67 percent reach, or audience potential, worldwide. What
brand marketer wouldn’t want to tap into such an influential
distribution network? But reach is not the only thing that makes these little
applications so appealing. Their very nature makes them extremely viral. With
the click of a button, widgets are embedded into homepages, blogs and social
networking profile pages where they are distributed further amongst a
user’s network of friends. But just how big are these environments?
Below are just a few stats from recent comScore data to give you an idea of
the potential for these tiny applications:
Geographically,
if we break down the 63 percent worldwide reach of social networks, it looks
a little more like this: Top Social Networks by Geographic Area
Source: The World
Map of Social Networks Worldwide “Reach”
No
single widget will completely penetrate any of these ecosystems, but given
their ability to be rolled out across platforms for little incremental
investment, the potential is large. What’s in it for
marketers? Building
an audience, brand awareness, direct response -- there are all reasons why
marketers are developing widgets. But how should they get started? The
first step is to figure out how widgets fit into your marketing objectives
and how they can help you reach your goals. What are you trying to
accomplish? Drive people to your website? Download an artist’s latest single?
Attend a movie premiere? Make an online purchase? Once
you have figured out what the end result will be, you should partner with a
developer to “widgetize” your best-suited content for
syndication. This can be done in-house, it can be handled by your advertising
or media agency, or it can be developed by a third-party widget specialist.
Most developers will provide their own syndication platforms to distribute,
track and measure the widget, and many developers may also have their own
content partners they work with. So it is not absolutely necessary to come to
the table with your own content. There are several widget developers to
partner with. Clearspring and Gigya are two developers that have received
a lot of press over the last few months as they carve out their niche in the
widget marketplace. Let’s take a deeper look at the two: Clearspring
is a provider of widget creation, distribution, tracking and monetization
services, used by some of the world's largest media companies, advertisers
and widget developers. It makes it easy for widget creators to get their
widgets into social networks, start pages and blogs. The company has
developed widgets for brands such as National Geographic, NBA.com, NBC
Universal, Time, and Maxim.com. Below is a look at the embedded functionality
of a Clearspring widget, which enables cross-platform proliferation from the
same widget entry point:
Gigya
is another developer carving out a niche in the widget space. The company
touts a full-service widget advertising model covering the design,
development, hosting, distribution, viral promotion and tracking of branded
widgets (think: rich media advertisements as widgets). Below is a look at
Gigya’s Wildfire platform -- again, the focus is on enabling attachment
in a variety of ways: |
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Mediasmith Morsel According
to recent data published by eMarketer,
widgets and applications are garnering far more attention than actual ad revenue.
eMarketer estimates that US companies will spend $40 million in 2008 to
create, promote and distribute widgets, up from $15 million in 2007.
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A Mediasmith Case Study: Samba
De Amigo Sega of America enlisted Mediasmith with
print and digital media efforts for their September 2008 release of Samba De
Amigo, a rhythm and music game built for the Wii platform. As one of the most important aspects
of game play, it would be important to highlight the music and artists
featured in the game, but to do so amid legal limitations and music
distribution rights posed major challenges. To solve this problem, Mediasmith
enlisted imeem, a leading music site and social network partnered with four
major music labels and thousands of independents, to create a homepage
featured playlist branded with characters and music featured in the game.
Additionally, Mediasmith disseminated the playlists in the place of
advertising on sites such as IGN, GamePro, and Game Informer to further build awareness among
the gaming community. Through
the imeem featured playlist, users could
listen to full length tracks from their favorite artists and link to an
exclusive Samba De Amigo imeem social profile page to download the playlist
for free, share it with their friends across the web, and post it to their
various social networking profiles through share technology exclusive to
widgets and applications.
By
campaign end, Sega saw approximately 4,830,988 playlist plays (a play is credited
when any user listens to an item on the playlist for 30 seconds or longer),
and was “favorited” by 140 users. Today, Samba De Amigo can still
be found at: http://www.imeem.com/sambadeamigo/playlists/
Content distribution vs.
sponsorship We know
that content is key. As mentioned previously, marketers with their own
content for distribution (i.e. video, games, RSS, music, etc.) might find it
best to work directly with developers. But for those without, there are
several piggy-back like opportunities available through developers and
content providers to utilize already existing (and successful) widgets. RockYou! and Slide are two examples of developers in the
space that have allowed marketers to brand-wrap or sponsor some of the most
popular widgets in the social networking space. Take Slide,
for example. Slide is the ninth largest global internet company from an
audience cume basis, representing 17 percent+ of global internet users,
according to comScore. Its distribution network reaches across 200+
countries, and it is the No. 1 application publisher on Facebook, with more
than 87MM widget installations across Facebook alone -- 63 percent of all
Facebook users have installed a Slide application. Slide has the capability
to accept non-traditional units or skins that are third-party ad served. Below
is a look at how DreamWorks (among other marketers) is integrating its brands
with Superpoke, Top Friends and Fun Wall -- three of Slide’s top
applications:
So how do we measure a
widget’s effectiveness? One of the
greatest challenges faced by marketers surrounds widget audience measurement.
While there is not a whole lot that isn’t measureable within the widget
itself, tracking it across the internet poses a challenge due to the fact
that audience measurement tends to take place at the publisher or
widget-serving platform level. For
example, comScore developed Widget Metrix back in June of 2007, to track the
usage of widgets across the web. Widget Metrix currently provides data on
Flash and JavaScript widgets only, but the service is further limited in that
it only provides data at the publisher (widget-maker) level. It cannot tell
where the widget is served from and tracks only by domain and widget name.
For this reason, back-end tracking and analytics data become ever important. Widget
developers and content providers tend to have their own platforms and
tracking capabilities that allow them to report on all traditional traffic
metrics -- unique visitors, views, time spent, clicks, mouse-overs, etc. But
many can also integrate with third-party ad servers as well as rich media
vendors (the aforementioned Clearspring recently announced an exclusive
partnership with Pointroll in December 2007). As for
3PAS, DoubleClick announced its
Widget Ads platform in March 2008. This platform is supported within the core
DART for Advertisers (DFA) ad-serving platform. Widget ads served through
this platform are created with a customizable sharing component (their
partner in this is Gigya) configured to allow for easy integration across
various social networking sites in hopes of generating virality. Atlas claims
to have similar capabilities, though this does not seem to be something it is
currently pushing as strongly as DoubleClick. We see
both pros and cons with the DoubleClick Widget Ad platform. In favor of rich
media ad serving is the ability to track impressions, clicks, conversion
attribution and other rich media metrics media agencies rely on that make for
more efficient reporting and analysis. On the down side, it may encourage
advertisers to “widgetize” ads that may not be well-suited for
the social networking environment, and this can have a negative impact on the
brand. A widget should provide something of value to the user; it should
embody some aspect that would make a user want to add the widget to their
profile page, blog, or customizable start page and share with their network
of friends. If your rich media ad embodies these characteristics, you may
have something, but if not, it is not likely to take on a viral effect. A
further challenge is that the metrics used for traditional digital display
advertising are not necessarily appropriate. Impressions and page views are
secondary to usage, interaction (actions and time spent), total embeds active
at a certain time, average “lifespan,” and transmission to
others. Current metric offerings do not adequately address these key
measures. To complicate further, just as with |
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Mediasmith Morsel What is the state of the
Blogosphere advertising support? According
to Technorati:
Source: "State of
the Blogosphere" |
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If you build it, will they come? Not
necessarily. There are several best practices to remember with widgets:
Conclusion Today’s
fragmented media environment has allowed consumers to take control of their
media consumption, and marketers have taken notice, and they are fighting
back, albeit discreetly, with widgets. Widgets
are a reflection of, and are continuing to shape, the evolving digital media
landscape. While there is a lot to plan for and consider when evaluating a
widget strategy, when executed properly, these tiny applications provide
marketers with the opportunity to break through the clutter on an exclusive
invite-only basis. Once
inside the front door (or on the profile, start page, or blog), widgets
afford these brands a plethora of opportunity to remain in this highly
coveted space. But only the smart widget marketers will survive. A version of this article originally appeared in iMediaconnection. |
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Contact Mediasmith, Inc. |
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