Sunday, February 17, 2008

Technology and Advertising: The Widget



Widget – n. a Portable chunk of the web
As generation Y’s, we are an incredibly valuable asset to the advertising industry. Being the tech savvy group that we are, I thought it would be a good idea to start a thread about technology pertaining specifically to advertising. To start the discussion off, I decided to post about what widgets are and their contributions to the field.

What are Widgets?

"Widgets are a class of client-side web application for displaying and/or updating local or remote data, packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine or device. Examples include clocks, stock tickers, news casters, games and weather forecasters."


There are many websites around dedicated to widget development. These sites allow people not only to create widgets, but facebook applications as well as "blidgets" (they turn your blog into a widget allowing you to spread it everywhere).

Widgets are great for advertising, especially for viral campaigns. My only concern as a GenY, is that widgets will be exploited and create even more clutter. This is why our generation entering the field will be good because for once I think we will be able to minimize clutter and be less annoying (atleast when targeting our generation).


Below is an article I found about Ad Widgets in 2008


BizReport : Advertising : January 20, 2008
2008: Year of the ad widget
Last year may have been the year of the widget, but 2008 is being heralded as the year of the ad widget.
by Helen Leggatt


Mpire launched the widget-based ad network, WidgetBucks, back October 2007. Since then it has signed up over 40,000 publishers and recently made the 1.5 billion monthly impression mark.
Now WidgetBucks is launching a set of “smart” ads. The ads will be able to present site visitors with optimal ads based on various data such as past ad performance and visitor’s country of residence, along with being able to dynamically switch between CPM and PPC pricing.
WidgetBucks is also considering running pre-roll ads to appear before the ad widget is shown.
"With ad serving decisions becoming increasingly complex, our single strand of JavaScript does all the heavy lifting to help publishers hold a higher standard than that being offered by traditional ad networks today," said Matt Hulett, CEO and president of Mpire, the company behind WidgetBucks, in a recent announcement. http://www.bizreport.com/2008/01/2008_year_of_the_ad_widget.html




Next week I'm going to talk about IP television.. my personal favorite topic (yeah I'm a bit of a tech geek ;-))

Technology and Advertising: The Widget

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