The future of widgets: upside
On December 1, 2008, AdAge featured an article by Bob Garfield called Widgets Are Made for Marketing, So Why Aren’t More Advertisers Using Them? Southwest Airlines, the article explains, created the “Ding” widget 
which allows Southwest Airline flyers to receive fare information on flights that interest them. It sits on the users desktop, without frequent aggravation, but will “Ding” if a flight they are interested in becomes available. Paul Sacco, the senior manager for online strategy and development for Southwest Airlines said, “After the first year, we hit the 2 million mark for downloads, and it’s still performing.” In the third quarter of 2008, Ding generated 10 million clicks. Garfield makes an excellent comparison of pre-Web 2.0 and post Web 2.0 when he says that branded widgets are, “the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World.” Furthermore, Garfield illuminates why widgets should be the new right hand man of marketers because they are incredibly inexpensive to distribute (Michael Lazerow, CEO of branded-application house Buddy Media, New York, says, “It [widget] is so cheap. This is the steal of the century,”) free to the user, personalized, easy to use, and they carry a specific message everywhere they go.
Briefly I would like to pay homage to Bob Garfield’s top picks for recent branded widgets that appear to work (and encourage readers to check out):
Miles: a 3D desktop avatar created by Tribal DDB that encourages you to run, and keeps track of your progress through the Nike Plus technology. Miles also informs you of local weather, running events, promotions. Miles is also iPod compatible.
InStyle’s Hollywood Hair Makeover: widget created by Buddy Media that allows you to take hairstyles from your favorite celebrities and superimpose them onto pictures of yourself.
CokeTags: A Facebook application by Advance Guard and Linkstorm that itemizes your favorite online links, and allows you to see who is visiting the sites you include.
The future of widgets: downside
The information below is a direct reference to Bob Garfield’s article:
* Nonstandardization. There are lots of incompatible platforms: desktop, iGoogle, mobile, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Pending software-code universality, you must create half-dozen or more versions of every widget.
* Dubious relevance to low-interest categories. What makes perfect sense for Johnnie Walker and Nike may not necessarily apply to Charmin.
* Cost. While the cost of creating a widget is enticingly small, and the cost of distributing one is low compared with media advertising, the price tag is also typically open-ended, thus hard to budget for.
* Scale. There is only so much space on a desktop or a Facebook page or a mobile-phone screen. That means the vast majority of marketers are shut out the vast majority of the time.
Based on all the information gathered, it appears as though widgets have become an effective new tool not only for users, but for marketers as well. NewsWeek deemed 2007 “the year of the widget,” and whether on the web, desktop, or phone, widgets are populating our fast-paced, technology world. In the future, innovators will take the standard widget that we are familiar with now, and more accurately optimize it for the Web 2.0 world.
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
