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November 29, 2007

EyeWonder Offers Ad Widgets. Are Your Ads Worth Sharing?

Here's one for all you marketers with widgets to promote. EyeWonder
has begun offering multi-function, sharable (a.k.a. "widget") ads within display units through a partnership with Gigya.

Gigya does not create the widgets. Rather it has the technical chops to guarantee existing widgets can be syndicated to numerous blogging platforms and social networking sites. It offers reporting as well.

In other words, if you already have a widget or want to let EyeWonder create a multi-paned video widget for you, you can stick it in a rich media ad and rest easy in the knowledge that it will be able to talk to Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, WordPress and other platforms.

Here's a sample:

Pretty nifty. Yet the ads aren't quite slick enough. The syndication features in particular ask a tad too much of the user. For instance, the "quick post" function for Facebook requests that I add a widget called "My Stuff" from Gigya. Come again? I thought I was installing an EyeWonder widget.

Anyway, the first client to use the product is Samsung's Juke phone, courtesy of ad agency Cheil USA.

It bears repeating that while widgets are certainly a notable trend this year, and it makes sense to retrofit your cooler ads with this kind of functionality, bloggers and social networking users deploy this stuff for very different reasons. Therefore it may be a mistake to lump them together in a single "widget ad buy."

Posted by Zachary Rodgers at November 29, 2007 12:49 PM

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