If you don't understand what widget marketing can do for your business, drop what you're doing and take five minutes to read this. Underscore Marketing's president explains.
For the umpteenth time I explained to a stranger that all people in online advertising aren't evil, and that I understood that a deluge of popup ads had frozen his computer, but I wasn't personally responsible. The twist here was that the stranger was holding a straight razor mere inches from my carotid.
No, the fight against obnoxious online ads hadn't taken a violent turn. I was getting a haircut in a small barbershop on Coronado Island, just a day before the start of the iMedia Brand Summit. That the guy holding the razor was a professional offered little comfort. He was pretty tweaked. Evidently, he had been online recently and had given up on his browsing session entirely because obnoxious popups had clogged what little bandwidth he could muster from a home dial-up connection.
I managed to escape without any major lacerations, but the experience got me thinking about what my colleague Jim Meskauskas refers to as a person's online "flow experience." Popups irritate the hell out of people because they put commercial messages between a user and a completion of a task. Banners irritate much less because, for the most part, people can ignore them if they want to, and the flow of their experience usually isn't interrupted.
Which brings us to a common axiom in this business, one that I think needs to be re-examined, and this is the presumption that advertising needs to be interruptive in order to work.
If you buy into the notion that the internet is good not only for consuming content but also for two-way dialogue and interactivity, then it logically follows that the most successful communications won't stand in the way of that dialogue.
Enter widget marketing. It's a discipline predicated on the idea that marketers ought to extend value to people in exchange for the privilege of being able to market to them. Marketers develop a mini-application that can provide value in the form of utility, banking on the notion that the application will be useful enough that it will be passed from user to user, broadening its reach and its ability to extend its message.
In many ways, it's like the online equivalent of merchandising, like when your local pizza parlor or dry cleaner gives out free magnets with their phone number on them in the hopes that you'll take one home and use it to affix little Billy's first grade art project to your fridge. My buddy Dan, who is a local politician on Long Island, gives me a pile of chip clips whenever an election year rolls around. Usually, I end up giving my extras to people who live in his district.
Widget marketing is a lot like that, only every recipient has an unlimited supply of chip clips to give out to others. Marketers extend value in a branded wrapper, and people appreciate it when they find it useful.
Now, if all good advertising is necessarily interruptive, can someone explain to me why there are branded widgets out there with millions of downloads?
The answer is that widgets are respectful of an online user's flow experience. They don't jump out at you from behind your favorite news story or slow down your search session. They're respectful and straightforward.
When I look at widget and gadget directories and some of the branded widget success stories within them, I see certain advertisers that have traditionally relied heavily on popups (Netflix, Orbitz, et cetera) are now experimenting with widget marketing. Perhaps they've found that there's merit to working with the flow experience instead of against it.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.