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Widget: Steep and Cheap

Widgets Are Made for Marketing, So Why Aren'tMore Advertisers Using Them?Bob Garfield Examines a Tool That Is Cheap, Easy and a Great Expression of thePost-Advertising Age

By Bob Garfield

Published: December 01, 2008

Some guy lives in Albuquerque, which is great, because it is sunny and really convenient to VistaEncantada and Hoffmantown. But he has relatives in Denver, a limited budget, a lot of outstandingfamily obligations and a seven-hour, 450-mile gulf between them. Then, one hot and dry Thursday, he'ssitting at a computer, and it goes ... "DING!"

An icon on his desktop has some breaking news: a special Albuquerque-Denver fare on SouthwestAirlines for $49 each way. It sends him that alert because he's asked for it, by downloading theSouthwest "Ding" widget. Most of the time it just sits there, apparently idle, a tiny Southwest logo on atiny Southwest tail section reminding him, at some extremely low level of consciousness, that Southwestexists.

But then it dings, and then he clicks, and, because UncleRamon and Aunt Ruth Ellen simply must be dealt with, hebooks.

"After the first year, we hit the 2 million mark fordownloads," says Paul Sacco, senior manager for onlinestrategy and development at Southwest Airlines. "And it'sstill performing." In the third quarter of 2008, Dinggenerated 10 million clicks.

Wanna get away ... from the Old Model? Look no furtherthan widgets, the mini software applications downloadable tobrowsers, desktops, social-networking pages, home pagesand mobile phones. The widget may not be the holy grail,but it's arguably pretty damn grail-ish -- maybe the highest

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How It Works: Advises users of special deals-- mainly loss leaders -- that draw them intothe online shopping experience.

Agency: In-house

expression so far of online marketing in the Post-AdvertisingAge. And though it is very much on the cutting edge of Web2.0, it is based on the hoariest of principles. In fact, to beproperly visionary on this subject, you must begin by lookingway back to the future.

For the past half-century (and for about five more minutes)TV advertising has been at the apex of marketing communications. Then, in no particular order,newspapers, magazines, radio, out of home, direct mail, point of purchase, collateral (brochures, forexample) and -- in the murky, mucky darkness at the very bottom of the deepest abyss of marketingprestige -- advertising specialties.

For example, a ballpoint pen emblazoned with your insurance agent's logo. Or a wall calendar, fridgemagnet, coffee mug, yardstick, foam beer-can sleeve, ashtray, key fob, emery board, pocket diary -- anycheap giveaway item meant to remind the consumer of you every single time she measures fabric orswigs a Pabst or files her nails.

Not that the 30-second spot represents high culture, exactly, but it's hard for mere words to convey howdéclassé the advertising-specialty niche is. Still, I'll try: What funnel cakes are to cuisine, free flyswatters are to marketing. In a digital world, advertising specialties are as analog as you can possibly get.

Until they go digital. Branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World. Thesecompact, portable little software apps -- from video players to countdown clocks to makeup simulators -- are inexpensive to distribute, free to the user and (often enough) distinctly useful. At a minimum, theycarry an ad message wherever they go.

That's at a minimum. At a maximum, the widget is something like the magical connection betweenmarketers and consumers, not only replacing the one-way messaging long dominated by mediaadvertising but vastly outperforming it. Because online the link is literal and direct, and along its path,data of behavior, preference and intention are left at every step. Oh, and your target consumers actuallygo out searching for your branded gimcrack. Oh, and they display it within easy reach. Oh, and they passcopies along to their friends and associates. Oh, and because they've been turned on by a friend, they arehospitable and receptive recipients. And, oh, in case this didn't quite register the first time I mentioned it,the barriers to entry are preposterously low. "The money is a joke," says Hillel Cooperman, ex-Microsoftbig shot and founder of small Seattle software-development shop Jackson Fish Market. "It's a roundingerror in the marketing business."

Ditto that, says Michael Lazerow, CEO of branded-application house Buddy Media, New York,especially when it comes to the cost of advertising (or, as he calls it, "app-vertising") the widget itself. "Itis so cheap. This is the steal of the century."

That's because 500 million social-network users, each generating 1,200 page views per month, represent600 billion monthly opportunities for an ad impression. Hence, almost everything is a remnant, and "youcan buy inventory for basically nothing," he says.

Of course, that invites online marketers to embrace another throwback concept: an endless fusillade ofmass messaging with no distinct target -- which is pretty much what digital marketing was supposed tobe the solution for, wasn't it? But more on the economics of widgetry to follow. For the moment, let'slook at some examples that demonstrate why, at least for the time being, it represents the very apotheosisof digital marketing. As my pal Jessica Greenwood of London's Contagious magazine sums up, thewidget's value is "like a basic unit of utility. The marketing becomes part of the product."



NIKE

Widget: Miles, a desktop avatar

How It Works: Encourages you torun; keeps track of your progressvia Nike Plus technology. He alsokeeps you apprised of localweather, running events andpromotions.

None more so than Miles, a 3-D desktop avatar that looks like a refugee from "Teletubbies" butresides on your desktop to encourage (i.e., nag) you to run, and keeps track of your progress viathe astonishing Nike Plus technology. He also keeps you apprised of local weather, running events,promotions. And he organizes your RSS feeds, so you can easily download to your iPod. FromTribal DDB.UPS Widget. This guy looks like Miles' tan cousin. He allows you to schedule and track shipmentsworldwide with a click or two. If you are any sort of frequent shipper, why wouldn't you installhim on your desktop? From McCann, London, and Skinkers.CokeTags is a Facebook app that displays your favorite links, allowing you to itemize your onlineself -- and keep track of who is following the trail of self you blaze. From the Advance Guard andLinkstorm.Steep and Cheap is an alert mechanism from the Backcountry.com catalog that advises users ofspecial deals -- mainly loss leaders -- that draw them into the online-shopping experience. It'sessentially like the Southwest Ding and works because the audience is as much a social network ofthe outdoorsy as a list of gear customers. In-house.InStyle's Hollywood Hair Makeover allows users to lift the coiffures of Jennifer Aniston, CameronDiaz, et al. and superimpose them on their own photos -- for fun and/or to show a stylist. Asuperficiality bull's-eye! From Buddy Media.So you're in Singapore, old enough to drink in bars and young enough for that to be a lifestyle.Download Johnnie Walker's Jennie widget, and there is a totally cute avatar that guides you to thecoolest saloon events and then, if you're half in the bag, safely home. From OgilvyOne.

Utility plus brandKind of hard to imagine users installing and using these ingenious apps and not appreciating the sponsorevery single time -- a concept that for, say, a banner ad is even more unimaginable. As high-techentrepreneur and former digital-marketing analyst Peter Kim puts it, "When you can combine utility withthe purpose of your brand, that's the opposite of why people hate marketing. Instead of fooling them withthe old brand-marketing song and dance, it's not a promise; it's a reality: 'This is what the traffic is like.This is what the weather is. This is what the stock market is rightnow.'"

Yeah, I'm grateful to John's Hardware when I kill insects dead, dead,dead with my free fly swatter, and I'm grateful to Johnnie Walkerwhen it helps me find the best Singapore bar and my stumbling wayback to my bed, bed, bed. That's the kind of dynamic that gets folksexcited, folks such as Newsweek and GigaOm's Om Malik, who eachdeclared 2007 "the year of the widget." And why? Because themarketer essentially gets to set up shop where you live, work and play.

"Inside the destination and the context people are already engaged in,"says Niall Kennedy, founder of consultancy Hat Trick Media and hosta month ago of the third-annual Widget Summit in San Francisco. "Iliken this to a small Cincinnati retailer setting up shop in all the citiesof the world instead of waiting for people to come to visit Cincinnati."

Yet in 2008 the entire segment will amount to something like $100million. That's not nothing, but even in the midst of economicimplosion, it's a sum even an endangered species such as NBCUniversal can shake out of the sofa cushions -- which drives softwaredeveloper Hillel Cooperman right up the wall. As he ventures out to



promotions.

Agency: Tribal DDB

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

Widget: Ding

How It Works: Park it on your desktop, tellSouthwest Airlines the prices and destinationsyou're looking for and it will update you onthe latest deals from Southwest.

Agency: GSD&M

AdTech and other prominent forums about marketing's future, he isconfounded by his inability to capture advertisers' attention. Even asthey bemoan the continuing collapse of traditional media and worryaloud about where to spend their money, he says, it's as if he'sinvisible. "And I'm jumping up and down. 'Hellooooo! Over here!'" he says, the frustration ringing in hisvoice. "All the stars are aligning. Everybody around me says, 'You're in the right place at the right time.'Yet it's still like pulling teeth."

Hmm. Magical connection. Pulling teeth. Those two images are hard to reconcile, but let's do try. Thereare plenty of reasons marketers have been slow to exploit the possibilities -- and why, no matter howgrail-ish it can be, the widget's place in even a fully digital marketing economy may have a relativelylow upper limit.

"The whole concept of a widget is just misstated or overblown," says Ben Kunz, director of strategicplanning for Mediassociates, a media-planning firm. "It's not the channel; it's what you do with it that'simportant."

Kunz actually likes widgets a great deal; he's just queasy to hear them oversold, given what he says aretheir inherent limitations -- not the least of which is the difference between engaging with a piece ofsoftware and engaging with the sponsoring brand. "There's a lot of hyperbole out there aboutengagement," he says.

For instance, if Schick Quattro sponsors a widget that lets aguy embed his face on the hunky body engaged in a pillowfight with two barely legal teens -- and it has -- does thiscarry over to razor purchases? "Does throwing pillows ateach other," Kunz asks, rhetorically we suppose, "reallyinfluence anyone?"

Even if the answer is yes, there are plenty of other issues toconsider.

Nonstandardization. There are lots of incompatibleplatforms: desktop, iGoogle, mobile, Facebook, MySpace,etc. Pending software-code universality, you must create ahalf-dozen or more versions of every widget.Dubious relevance to low-interest categories. What makes

perfect sense for Johnnie Walker and Nike may not necessarily apply to Charmin.Cost. While, as Cooperman correctly observes, the cost of creating a widget is enticingly small,and the cost of distributing one is low compared with media advertising, the price tag is alsotypically open-ended. Marketers can be socked with fees up to $5 every time some Courtney orMadison embeds a widget on her MySpace page. So if you get lucky, you could also get unlucky."Open-ended" is hard to budget for.Scale. There is only so much space on a desktop or a Facebook page or a mobile-phone screen. AsKunz observes, "Sure, you can give them utility, but there are only so many slots for that utility. Inmy world, there may be 100 things that I use a computer for. So conceivably you can create awidget for each one of those things, but you've limited the inventory." That means the vastmajority of marketers are shut out the vast majority of the time.

Then there is the Great Widgetry Schism, a fundamental philosophical difference among users anddevelopers as to what the technology is best suited for. In commissioning a widget, do you wish to be allthe rage with those notoriously fickle Courtneys, who create viral sensations that spread far and wide but



SCHICK QUATTRO

Widget: Trim Flixx

How It Works: Upload your face onto ahunky guy's body and pillow fight with barelylegal teens. We're not sure why.

JOHNNIE WALKER

quickly peter out? Or do you shoot for endurance, residing on home pages and desktops perhaps inperpetuity? The bias among widget shops seems to be entertainment over utility, essentially usingwidgets much like ads: to briefly get users attention and then start over when that attention wanes.

"It's a campaign model," says Liza Hausman, VP-marketing for Gigya, the largest widget-distributionagency. "Advertisers are still going to have to move the needle in a particular time frame. There arepeople who are looking at widgets as customer relations management or long-term dialogues. That's notwhere we focus."

Hausman says this model also conforms well with consumerbehavior, especially among the habitués of MySpace, et al.There, she says, a user's page is an ever-changing expressionof self, which often is expressed in the form of a showcasefor the user's latest discovery. In short, says Hausman, "userslike to update their pages." In addition, if you assume thatutility-based widgets tend to reside on desktops, vs. social-networking pages, the utility imperative comes at theexpense of virulence.

"That is a one-to-one relationship," Hausman says. "Thatwidget is seen only by the person who put it there. Thosewidgets help you get through the day: news, weather, info,"compared with social-network-page widgets that reside"where people are putting a public face on their world. Andthe widget there has a 1-to-many, many exposure."

That argument would seem to be backed up by data. A studyby online-market-research firm Marketing Evolution foundthat return on investment from widgets increases inapproximately direct proportion to virulence. The study, of campaigns from Adidas and video-gamepublisher Electronic Arts within MySpace, found that 70% of the ROI was attributable to consumer-to-consumer proliferation. The consulting firm calls this the "momentum effect," and clearly the momentumis a function of the kind of sharing that, say, the Southwest Ding doesn't much enjoy.

"I have no vested interest," says Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs. "But I do tend to lean that way,mainly because we know there are decay curves to advertising. Keeping it novel and fresh generates alarger response. Part of it is the ability and desire to pass along what you're saying. Something newmakes it newsworthy, worthy of passing it along to others, and there's value to that."

On the other hand, companies such as Gigya absolutely do have a vested interest and a structural biasagainst the enduring-utility model: Duration militates against repeat business. If a client successfullylands a widget on a zillion desktops or social-networking pages, and it stays there, the client has far lessincentive to commission subsequent efforts, which, obviously, is bad news for the software designersand distributors. Furthermore, the problem with entertainment widgets such as games is the same one thatafflicts any form of viral marketing: Virulence is hard to achieve. No matter how many Courtneys areout there, it's really hard to be the Next Big Thing that, however briefly, captures their imaginations. AsCooperman puts it, "Games are just like music and movies and books. It's a hit-driven business. I thinkit's fair to say nobody knows how to make a hit in any of those industries."

Whichever side of the schism you embrace, widgets offer advantagesthat hardly any other marketing tool can match. Chief among them:



Widget: Jennie, a cute avatar

How It Works:If you're in astrange land and looking for adrink, Jennie will guide you to thebar and back to your hotel.

Agency: OgilvyOne

portability. Can't get people to visit your website? Once they visit, youcan't lure them back? Try the amazing new Website-in-a-Can! It'scompact! You can store it on your desktop, your Bebo page . . . or youcan fold it up and put it in your toolbar! Fun time, party time, anytime!

And it really, really works! Logs data like a website, enables directcommerce like a website and becomes a destination like a website,only without the user having to leave the virtual house. She merelygoes to the cupboard and opens up a can. For free, of course. BecauseWebsite-in-a-Can is so cheap to produce, folks can just give it away.

Buddy Media, one of the biggest creators of branded apps, fills twofloors of a slightly skeezy office building on Broadway just aboveColumbus Circle. It used to be a Fred Astaire Dance Studio, with aground-level Indian restaurant and water seeping down the bare-brickwalls after every rain. Now it's a code factory, where workers load rawzeroes and ones into their Macs and forge software parts -- parts thatare in turn assembled in various combinations to form customapplications. Using that small inventory of a few hundred in-stockparts, Buddy Media can turn out widgets fast and cheap.

"If you're going to do a 728-by-90 banner ad," says CEO Lazerow, "you might as well do an app.Because it's going to take the same amount of time and cost." What he doesn't advise is buying for reachand frequency. His buzz term is "reach and engagement," the idea of cultivating a few people instead ofpestering a lot more. "Instead of reaching 80 million people, let's reach a million in your target andspend 10 minutes with them." Buddy Media has no difficulty establishing the engagement part. Its hairdowidget for InStyle magazine had more than 300,000 installs, 185,000 in the first six weeks. The averagetime spent on each visit was seven minutes -- three hairstyles' worth -- and nearly half of the usersreturned to it more than 25 times. "They basically cost less than traditional banners, and you get 75 timesgreater time spent than with regular banners and five times more time spent than with TV ads."

One believer among his clients is Keith S. Levy, VP-marketing for Anheuser-Busch, which created aBud Light Dude Test widget to leverage [Note to readers: I have just used the word "leverage" as a verb.This will never happen again.] a Bud Light ad called "Dude."

"The multiplier effect of the web is extremely powerful," Levy says. Though the 300,000 downloads arelaughable compared with a TV buy, "you're really getting a relationship with the consumer." Anotherwidget, created just for the lucky winners of the Bud Light Party Cruise promotion, for instance,established an ongoing community of 4,000-some evangelists such as rowyco, who (according to hisMySpace page) is a 24-year-old Arizonan whose nickname is an obscene acronym, whose slogan is"Hardcore for Life," who likes country and metal and tricked-out motorcycles, and who is working on abusiness degree at Paradise Valley Community College. His friends are Judith, Diana, Courtney (!),Crazy Christene, Justin, The Rouch and -- right at the top of the list -- Bud Light Party Cruise.

Compare this effort, for instance, with Bud TV, which at a cost of $15 million for the first two yearsalone, attempted to create a content destination more or less paralleling the tube. What Anheuser-Buschearned for its trouble was a squizzillion views of the hilarious commercial "Swear Jar," the enduringenmity of many state attorneys general, and zero MySpace friends. One day in late November, Bud TV'sglobal web ranking, according to the online-analytics site Alexa, was 26,253,061. To put that inperspective, moisttowelettemuseum.com was ranked 5,681,20947. As they say over at A-B, lessons werelearned. Though he won't characterize Bud TV as a boondoggle, when pressed to look at the relative



INSTYLE

Widget: Hollywood Hair Makeover

How It Works: Steal the hottest hairstylesfrom the likes of Jennifer Aniston andCameron Diaz and plop them on your own

efficiency of Bud TV and pocket-change widgetry, Levy offers, "Did we have to build a stationarynetwork where people have to go and get stuff? No."

Of course, engagement -- and even community -- cannot be directly correlated to sales. But, excuse me,apart from direct-response advertising, what can? As for the other outstanding issues casting suspicionon the sustainability of widgetry, let's take one more look:

Platform incompatibility. While some functionality is sacrificed, something close to universal codeis not far off. Lazerow says by the spring, his apps will be, with a minimum of tweaking, one sizefits all.What works for a sexy brand might not work for Charmin. Upon further reflection, why not?Given about two seconds thought, I came up with about 10 toilet-paper-relevant ideas in varyingdegrees of offensiveness, from SoftCam (rotating video of a basket of kittens, baby butts,ducklings, etc.) to a Full-of-Shit-o-Meter (feeding news quotes from celebs, athletes and pols thatare transparently disingenuous or worse).Cost. Yes, $5 an install can add up, but many vendors charge much less. More to the point, though,who says that the calendar is the right allocation tool for marketing expenditures? As long as we'rereinventing commerce, should we not consider the possibility that marketing programs will befinanced for as long as they perform, without arbitrary campaign boundaries? "I guess I can'tunderstand the marketers' narrow-minded definition of the controlled calendar, because that's nothow consumers' minds work," says Briggs. "It's like Coca-Cola saying, 'All those people with theCoke memorabilia from the '50s, I want it out of their house, because that's not the Coke messagetoday.'"Shelf space. Even if you accept that there is a finite amount of real estate on the world's 500million social-networking pages, the universe is expanding by the second. "Saturate the market?"Lazerow says. "We're not even close. I can't see a world in which we're going to saturate thismarket."

Audience migrationOh, and one final thing. If you are a marketer who's spent the past decade investing in a robust website toattract customers and prospects, and you're therefore disinclined to cannibalize your traffic by givingaway Website-in-a-Can, don't get too smug. Your audience is making that decision for you.

In the past three months, according to Alexa, Apple.com'spage views per user are down 9%; Comcast.net is down 1%;Dell.com, down 22%; AT&T.com, down 18%; Xbox.com,down 9% and so on as corporate e-bastions begin toexperience the same audience fragmentation that is killingold media. "As popular as your site may be," says Kennedy,the reality is that people are actually visiting Yahoo,MySpace, Google and Facebook thousands of times morethan they're visiting you."

Tony Zito of MediaForge, which handles Steep and Cheap,calls this "the slow death of the destination website."Consider the source -- the man sells widgets -- but even ifhe's hyperventilating, the trends are a bit ominous.

If Mohammed has indeed cut back on his visits to themountain, it may be time for the mountain to go toMohammed.



Cameron Diaz and plop them on your ownhead.

Agency: Buddy Media

After all -- Ding! -- the fares are pretty low.

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