Promo - December 2007 - (Page 30)

THEY’RE Staples has an “Easy” button for you. In fact, it has several. There’s the one that’s been featured in its print and television ads since 2005. There’s also the one it sells for $4.99 in stores. Hit it and you hear “That was easy!” just like on TV. And there’s the one you can download free as a computer desktop widget. Click it and you’re taken directly to Staples’ online catalog—a time saver for a small business or home office worker looking for supplies. You also can use the widget to check on your Staples Rewards points and get new product alerts automatically via RSS data feeds. Consumers by the thousands have downloaded the Easy button widget. But more than a handful have asked for something more. They want the sound. “We’ve had numerous requests from our customers for audio with the downloadable Easy button,” says Catherine Cusack, vice president of brand programs for Staples. WIDGETS? DONE RIGHT, DESKTOP TOOLS CAN CREATE BRAND EVANGELISTS BY BRIAN QUINTON “Thousands of people have found the button useful, and this should help make it fun, too.” “Useful and fun” pretty much sums up the appeal of widgets, which are self-contained snippets of code that can be installed quickly on a computer desktop or personal Web page. They’re often designed to do one, two or a small handful of useful tasks. They’re also meant to be highly entertaining and engaging, and represent an important new way to reach an ever more fragmented online audience. The earliest widgets were created by independent garage programmers, who made them available to friends or through a Web site. Starting in 2005, Google and Yahoo! began offering entire galleries of them that users could add to their personalized iGoogle or My Yahoo! pages. Yahoo! lists more than 3,800 widgets that are downloadable from its gallery. Google, going its own way and calling them “gadgets,” presents for the taking more than 23,000 of the things. But the pace of widget innovation has begun to heat up in the past year due in large part to marketers’ interest in social networks, where members commonly use personal pages to showcase their interests. Firms look at the social networking phenomenon as a branding opportunity. Getting even a small number of these evangelists to add a widget with their content, service and sometimes even a logo to a profile page means more brand impressions for very little money. And giving those viewers an easy way to grab the widget and put it on their own page increases that distribution exponentially. GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNING The widget strategy is most effective if a brand already fosters a sense of community. When Harley-Davidson wanted to promote the annual Sturgis, SD Bike Week motorcycle rally in August, it asked Interpublic agency 30 December 2007 / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / Promo http://www.promomagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Promo - December 2007

Promo - December 2007 Contents Editor's Note Urban Refuge Digital Directive Soft Soap Voice Lessons Jordan's Monster Deal College Bowl Sprawl Good Deeds Commentary Blue Christmas Q&A: Clutter Cutter Widgets? They're Easy The Agency Center Resource Center Secret Weapon Index of Advertisers

Promo - December 2007

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