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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BRANDING UNBOUND The Blog
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ADWEEK Magazines Excerpt
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