Gen Wow

Back from Digital Hollywood

Just don't call us the Digital Hollywood Squares.

I was in Santa Monica this week to participate in a panel discussion on games as an advertising and marketing platform for entertainment and consumer products brands.

It was a lively discussion with executives from several of the online and mobile gaming outfits, and hosted by James Green, CEO of Giant Realm. Great group of people, and an interesting debate.

Some really intelligent (and funny) people aboard - which made it feel like a game show.

Peter Marshall, eat your heart out.

Read more, here.

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Volkswagen To Rely Exclusively On iPhone App For New GTI Launch

Hey, if it's the most cost-effective way to reach your demo, why not lean heavily on an iPhone app?

But exclusively?

That's what VW plans for the launch of the new GTI. I'm having a hard time believing the total universe of GTI's prospective buyers own iPhones, but let's get to that in just a bit.

According to Automotive News, the marketer spent $60 million launching the GTI in 2006. Now it thinks it can do better on a $500,000 iPhone budget, which will include a Real Racing GTI game for the IPhone and iPod Touch, a virtual showroom, and (this is cool), the ability for users to send video clips of races game play to YouTube and messages via Twitter.. The agency behind the effort is AKQA (I interview founder Tom Bedecarré at length in my new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND (spring 2010, Amacom/McGraw-Hill).

The game isn't even built from the ground up; it's licensed from an existing game, saving the brand a lot of money.

But an iPhone/iPod only approach? Automotive News points to the fact that there are 50 million iPhones and iPods in use worldwide, but only 21 million viewers watch CBS' "NCIS," the most-watched TV show for the week ending October 18.

Still. The game won't be on every iPhone and iPod Touch - 50 million is the total number of users, not the universe of potential GTI owners therein. And you can't compare usage to ratings for one show. In terms of reach and frequency, GTI's target demo watches any number of shows during a one month period.

Not that the game doesn't sound cool, and the PR value of an iPhone-only approach will resonate with the target audience. But mobile is one touchpoint in integrated campaigns. Not THE touchpoint.

Time will tell if, or how well, the strategy pays off.

Hopefully it will be a major win for the brand, and that the company best known for innovative print and television ads like "Lemon," this campaign won't bring unintended meaning to that age old tagline.

Read all about it, here.

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First Look: The Cover of My New Book, 'The On-Demand Brand'

Forgot to mention that during my speaking engagement at the Global Retail Executive Council at CTIA this week, I was able to share the first glimpse of the cover art for my new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND (Amacom/McGraw-Hill, Spring, 2009). Be sure to read all about the book, here. 

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BRANDING UNBOUND WAS JUST THE BEGINNING:

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BRANDING UNBOUND The Book
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Wall Street Journal: The Widget Wave That Wasn't

File under: Things that make you go "duh."

The Wall Street Journal has a piece today on how so many Internet stat-ups have been forced to change business strategies after seeing their ad-supported widget dreams fizzle. Gee: Couldn't see that coming.

The fact is, widgets are as misunderstood as mobile. Mobile is not powerful as an advertising delivery channel, but rather as a response or "activation" mechanism to make advertising and content in traditional media interactive. Likewise, widgets are powerful as channels for delivering branded experiences and services, not as third party experiences supported by advertising.

Pizza Hut's Facebook widget/app, for instance, enables users to place orders to pizza right from your profile page. It's not like many will (then again, they might - Pizza Hut has already surpassed $1 billion in sales from such online sales).

The point is, there is no new "business model" required, beyond the ones already designed for online sales operations. It's a widget/app, created by the brand, to deliver an experience or offer a service. (For more information on this approach, be sure to check out my new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, coming spring 2010.)

As for the kind of widgets the WSJ story looks at - widgets that let you create characters for social networking sites, well, I can't say I get the appeal.

Then again, that may be the problem.

Read the WSJ piece here.

And for more on THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, click here.

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Sprint Widgets: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Nothing Very Useful

I saw this a few weeks back and kept forgetting to post about it. It's completely worthless, but I love it. It's the "This Is Now" Sprint Widgets dashboard from Goodby.

In one place, you'll see widgets featuring such ephemera as the number of coffee cups being produced. The number of 911 calls being made. The top words being used online (at this moment, "from" and "while"). The number of eggs being produced.

It's all very fun, and designed, somehow, to promote Sprint's mobile card for laptop computers (the idea that you can get up to speed on anything and everything, wherever you are right now.) 

Speaking of which, go ahead and stop what you're doing now and waste several minutes here. You may or may not regret it.

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'Watchmen' Get Widget

The Doomsday Clock doesn't kick in until next Summer - and that's if Paramount, Warner and Fox can work out some nasty movie right issues - but the much anticipated comic book-cum-popcorn movie "Watchmen" is getting an official "Countdown" widget.

"Watchmen," based on the ridiculously popular Alan Moore graphic novel, hits theaters 188 days from now - and the widget will help fans breathlessly count down each second - as well as access all the natest news from director Zack Snyder's blog, plus special webisodes, clips and more.

Start your, er, watches, here.

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'Indiana Jones' Runs On Widget Power In Promotion Guaranteed To Go Viral

Looks like old Indy's jonesn' for some of that Web 2.0 action.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount Pictures will launch a widget this week to help promote the upcoming film "Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull." The genius: The studio's not hoping it goes viral - it's ensuring it does.

Working with widget farm Clearspring, Paramount says the two fans who manage to distribute their "Skull" widgets most will win trips to the world premiere of the movie and the chance to be red-carpet correspondents in footage that will be streamed onto the "Skull" widgets after the premiere.

Clearspring's behind a similar effort that launched this week for the Mike Meyers comedy "The Love Guru."

Read more about it, here.

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Business Week: 'The CEO's Guide To Widgets'

At a recent conference, I told the audience that the #1 trend in digital marketing for 2008 is branded widgets - and Business Week's out to prove me right.

That's with caveats, of course - as I agree. You have to do widgets right to make them work - and there's much still be learned. Whether they're short- or longterm fixtures in digital marketing remains to be seen. But as I told that conference, either way, they're the hot topic of 2008.

Check out this excellent view for senior executives, here.

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Interview: Gydget Delivers Wonders of Widgets To Sports & Entertainment Marketers

You’re going to go ga-ga for Gydget.

Like no other solution I’ve seen, Gydget is making it ridiculously easy to capitalize on easily-customizable widgets (or “gydgets”) and spread them virally across social networks - with an eye toward the sports and entertainment industries.

Think widgets that fans of a music artist, or sports team, can drop onto their Facebook or MySpace pages; widgets that then feed a constant flow of news, photos, music videos, event alerts, and even the ability buy tickets to far flung network of friends.

Because gydgets are template-based, no coding or design expertise is necessary.

All that news and event information is automatically imported from a music group’s or team’s own MySpace page, for instance. And commerce is handled through affiliate deals the San Francisco-based startup has established with major ticket retailers.

Once built, the gydget can be placed on the organization's site for fans to see, grab, and share with their friends. And each time a “friend” grabs the gydget, they can opt to be featured as a “top friend” on the band or team’s website, MySpace page and on the band widget.

What’s more, marketers can then track how many people grabbed the gydget, how many people have watched any video, and where the gydget has been placed, and more.

Best of all: It’s free.  In the future, Gydget hopes to build out a revenue stream by enabling outside marketers to buy advertising space on gydgets so brands hoping to associate themselves with a popular music artists, for example, can buy banner space on the artist’s gydget.

I went to Michelle Wohl, Gydget’s vice president of marketing (and former Nokia exec), to get the inside scoop on what makes Gydget so great.

(Approx. 7:50)

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2008: The Year Of The AdverWidget

At a conference this fall, I surprised an audience of major ad industry types by predicting the #1 digital marketing trend for the year ahead would be branded widgets.

It seems others are coming to the same conclusion.

Sure, last December, Newsweek declared 2007 would be the year of the widget. But they were off by a year. 2007 was huge for the development and adoption of widgets, 2008 will see an explosion of marketers and media companies using them for branded content, applications and ad venues.

Now, CNET is taking up the cause, too.

The news service is pointing out that Ford is now launching a new online ad campaign using widgets that will run on AOL sites. The widgets advertise Sync, an in-car system that lets you speak commands to use a mobile phone and digital music device.

According to CNET, the Sync widget ad lets you download a free song or view a number of short humorous videos, and offers more information about the product. You can also grab the widget and embed it into other sites.

"This is an effective way for marketers to share their brand with influencers out there," says Peter Kim, president of Interpolls, which is hosting the Sync widget ads, as well as tracking their performance even as they get passed on to blogs, RSS readers, social networks, and home pages across the Web. "It has to be compelling enough for someone to want to grab it and place it onto their page," he said.

As CNET points out, if the Sync widget doesn't grab you, others will. eHarmony's got one, as does the Nissan, Honda, Warner Bros. movie "August Rush." I can list about 25 brands myself - and am currently working on some with clients.

"In the future, this is probably going to be the model for all advertising across media, but we're still in the early stage of the evolution of these things," Andrew Frank, a research director at Gartner, tells CNET.

I actually think it's much bigger than that. I think it'll go beyond just "ads" and transform the very what and why of websites - not just in terms of content and delivery, but of commerce.

Looking back at that fall conference, it's funny to think that most in attendance - marketers from major brands and New York ad agencies - either had no idea what a widget was, or didn't understand the implications for marketers.

As I told them then, it's about to become clearer as 2008 gets rolling.

Reach the CNET piece, here.

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Digitas: Mobile On Margins, But Widgets Pack Wow

Looks like Jordan Bitterman isn't bullish about mobile. But he's seriously into widgets.

Speaking at an industry confab the other day, Bitterman, VP and media director for Digitas, said he believes mobile "doesn't have scale." See my comments on that in BRANDING UNBOUND the blog.

But according to MediaPost, Bitterman says he and his peers at Digitas are nuts about widgets.

"With widgets, we've had some good experiences," he added. "We're seeing click-through rates of 10%, and engagement beyond that click is also very high."

As MediaPost points out, over 81 million consumers in North America--or a full 40.3%--were exposed to Web widgets in April, according to a widget tracking service recently launched by comScore. And beyond just branding applications, widgets could also emerge as powerful advertising networks.

For more, click here.

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Google Launches Widget Advertising Tools

It's official: Google is unveiling a new Gadget Ads program today.

On the heels of Google's announcement yesterday to extend AdSense ads to mobile devices, the search giant says its moving AdSense into that other big digital push: widgets - small online tools that function like mini-websites - to enable marketers to create branded widgets for web and desktop use.

It's the current craze in digital marketing, with many publishers and advertisers experimenting with ways to put their brands and content right in front of consumers instead of hoping consumers come to them.

The Times, citing stats from comscore, says more than 48 percent of Internet users in the United States — over 87 million people — now use widgets, with the most popular appearing on Facebook pages.

"Widgets are a dream for marketers," Dimitry Ioffe, CEO of Media Banners, a division of digtal ad agency Visionaire Group, tells today's New York Times. "They allow them to extend their brand off of their individual sites and allow their brands to live as long as consumers want them to live."

Read the Times piece, here.

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JC Penny Launches Branded Widget With Promos, Fashion Tips & More

JC Penney's going fashion forward with a branded widget that brings promotions and content directly to consumers' desktops.

ADWEEK is reporting that the effort, developed by T3 in Austin and a widget company Skinkers in London created the JCPToday application. It streams product offers from the retailer, twice-a-week fashion tips and reminders of personal events users enter.

According to the pub, a small window appears onscreen to alert users to updated JCPToday information. The application links back to products on jcp.com.

Kate Donaho, group creative director at T3, which has handled JC Penney's e-mail campaigns for six years, tells the pub,

"E-mail continues to be a valuable way of talking to customers, but this gets a deeper connection by being part of the desktop and serves the user, not just JC Penney."

The company joins the likes of Johnnie Walker, which created "The Keep," a widget that pipes news and other content to users, Honda, which made a widget that brought real-time traffic conditions to the desktop, and Adidas, which created a branded desktop widget that allows users to get all the latest soccer news plus exclusive Adidas content.

For more, click here.

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