- GigaOm, Thursday, February 21, 2008 11 AM
Marketers would love to live to see the day when consumers proudly wear brands like badges on their social-networking profile pages. Widgets, those little embeddable software programs you see all over
sites like Facebook, provide a means to do that (sort of). The great thing about widgets is that distribution is totally viral (i.e. free) and consumers decide to put them on their own pages. So, if
your brand is cool enough or your product desirable enough, then consumers will want to show their friends.
For example, Toyota recently launched a new campaign for its Scion line of
vehicles in which rich media banner ads doubled as uploadable widgets. Adrian Si, an interactive marketing manager for Scion, believes the widgets could achieve the same 1 to 2 percent click-through
rate as the rich media banners. That would translate to a 4 percent to 5 percent engagement rate. To measure the campaign, Scion will monitor both click-throughs and the number of times the widget is
installed on someone's site. "This could be more valuable [than banner ads]," says Si.
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