Promo - December 2007 - (Page 31)

widgets Carmichael Lynch Strang to come up with some Web-oriented ideas. What resulted was a Google gadget offering a live feed from the streets of Sturgis during the daylight hours and Sturgisbased interviews with bike designers, Ultimate Fighter, and even Geraldo Rivera at night. The response was “phenomenal,” says Chris Wexler, interactive media director at Carmichael Lynch. Coverage started Sunday, Aug. 5, and by Tuesday 3,000 of the gadgets had been downloaded from Google. Promotion occurred mainly through seeding mentions on influential biking blogs and Web sites. The widget was featured on Harley’s main Web site as well. It also received a small link in banner ads touting the Sturgis coverage. All told, 25,000 people downloaded the widget that week. And those users were interacting extensively with the content. “If someone downloaded the widget, he or she would watch on average for 20 minutes a day during the week we were Webcasting,” Wexler says. Usage was so heavy that Google needed to allot additional bandwidth for the live video feed. The Harley widget was available only for iGoogle personal pages, but Wexler says his agency and Harley are both interested in broadening the scope of future programs—possibly as soon as the next live-feed event, Beach Bike Week in Daytona, FL in February. BRINGING THE BRAND TO THEM In a sense, the widget wave is the flip side of the engagement coin. Marketers have moved from simply driving traffic to their Web sites to inducing visitors to stay there longer, soaking up the branding effects. Widgets reverse that tack and move the online brands to where the consumers already are. Particularly for the under-35 demographic, that means social networking pages. An August study by Nielsen/ NetRatings of U.K. Internet users found that Facebook was the fourthranked Web site in terms of monthly time spent (on average, 2 hours and 32 minutes). Eurocentric social net Bebo was fifth (2 hours and 15 minutes a month) and MySpace sixth (1 hour and 25 minutes). “The wide trend at work is the fragmentation of the Internet,” says Ori Soen, CEO of widget platform MuseStorm. “Five or 10 years ago, when people logged on to the Internet, they went to Yahoo! or MSN, large publishers’ or large marketers’ Web sites. That’s all changing. Over the past few years, people have come to spend most of their time on blog sites and social networks. Marketers are finding it harder to reach their audiences or gain new ones because their Web sites are not primary destinations anymore.” Widgets are a way to reach potential users where they live, Soen adds. Placed within a profile page, they can take advantage of the “trust” effect. Someone visiting a Facebook or MySpace profile probably shares a number of interests. For example, the widget that MuseStorm developed for McCann-Erickson for the October release of Microsoft’s Halo 3 console game was a natural fit for gamers’ own blogs and social pages. “On the one hand, widgets give users the ability to place what they want where they want—on Facebook, MySpace, their desktops or their The Cincinnati Bengals’ widget loads on fans’ pages and links to a season schedule, articles, videos and more. Harley-Davidson’s widget—available only for iGoogle personal pages— offered a live feed from Sturgis, SD, host city of the annual Bike Week motorcycle rally. mobile phones,” Soen says. “On the other, it lets marketers and publishers package content in a very viral, interactive manner.” Musestorm and other widget platform companies like Clearspring, SpringWidget (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) and Gydget not only help marketers develop widgets for their content but host and optimize them to fit the standards used by different platforms, as well as measure their spread and use. Gydget created a widget last spring for the Cincinnati Bengals, the first for a National Football League team. The device loads on fans’ personal pages and links to a season schedule, an RSS news feed of Bengals-related articles and team videos, and to the online store and fan forum on the Bengals’ home site. Andy Ware, the team’s Webmaster and director of new media, says the widget has been downloaded about 6,000 times. The widget should serve as a means of staying connected with the team’s most loyal fans during the offContinued on page 32 Promo / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / December 2007 31 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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