eROI Days Email Agency

Online marketing dollars will rapidly shift towards Custom Web Apps and Widgets. We really can’t take credit for this prediction – every panelists and keynote speaker (including top folks from NBC Universal, CondeNast, and Google) at the Sep’07 MediaPost’s OMMA East show was preaching the power of widgets. Why? Because users don’t want to leave the online communities where they socialize and interact in. Until recently, brands and media companies assume that online users will leave Facebook, MySpace, or other community and go to the advertiser’s site or media site to learn more.

That has changed. Now, brands need to make their marketing messages more interactive and more portable. YouTube popularized this with providing the code for any video for people to copy and paste onto their blog, website, Facebook or MySpace page. Doritos, NBC, HBO, and any other savvy advertiser or media company is starting to do this. For example, HBO put a widget of a disco ball countdown on its site FutureSexLove.com. When the show launched, the disco ball virtually exploded across the thousands of sites, blogs, and profile pages that downloaded the widget.