• by Tameka Kee , May 22, 2008

Think fast! If you could have any super power, would it be super strength? What about eternal youth? Or how about mind control? Those are some of the questions that a new widget asks as part of a promotion for DreamWorks' upcoming animated film "Kung Fu Panda." Interpolls is the company behind the widget, which created similar promotions for DreamWorks' "Shrek" and "A Shark Tale."

The campaign is a way to breed familiarity with the Kung Fu Panda characters, including the Jack Black-voiced lead, Po. At the crux of the widget is a personality test that tells users which Kung Fu Panda martial arts master they would be best served by training with. The widgets also include movie trailers, which will increase in length from the teaser trailer to the full-length clip as the film's premiere draws closer.

Pasadena, Calif.-based Interpolls' widgets run on a combination HTML/Flash platform, which allows for the optimization of content (including quizzes, video and audio clips) according to performance. "The platform will drop the bottom-performing questions or clips on a per-placement, per-site basis," said Peter Kim, president and founder of Interpolls. "This way you keep the most popular content in rotation and boost the viral power of the widget."

The Kung Fu Panda widget also keeps track of how many times it has been passed onto or attached to a user's social network profile, and the "generation" of the action--meaning whether it was grabbed directly from the DreamWorks site, from another user's profile, and so on.

Kim said that Interpolls runs widgets on a CPM model, because a CPC or CPA model would become cost-prohibitive for advertisers. "Performance-based pricing doesn't work because our ad units perform too well," he said. "We don't want to penalize them for being successful."