DaxThink: Digital life

Seems to be one of the great digital marketing buzz words of 2008 doesn't it?

Everyone seems to be building one, promoting one or adding one to their desktop. Great little tools or transportable code that allow us as marketers to distribute our functionality or message to a greater audience often via a viral mechanism.

But...

Earlier this week I was asked to speak at a widget conference and so prepared a talk about how media planning must evolve to make the most of the benefits widgets offer. But whilst I was doing this I couldn't help but think that this was something and nothing.

Widgets have their uses, and have helped us as marketers focus on engagement and interaction as apposed to just pushing a message out. But most 'widgets' really are nothing new, and are simply interactive rich media banners.

Banners have been able to take the search or booking form from a website and transport it millions of times around the web for years; in fact the last company I worked at (Bluestreak) pioneered the expandable, search enabled banner back in the mid/late 90's using Java.

What does define a widget then over a banner? I would argue it's a grey area, and having attended a conference on it I think it is even greyer than I thought before. In simple terms though, a banner becomes a widget when provision is given for it to be taken out of its native environment and embedded onto the desktop, a social space or elsewhere.

Isn't it true that (nearly) all widgets can be banners, but not all banners can be widgets?

I can take a widget that was designed as a viral tool and ad-serve it across my media plan into standard ad units, why is that a widget? Make it shareable and suitable for a specific audience in a social environment for instance and then yes, you have a widget.

Of course there are exceptions, and there has been some good work done on tools that clearly are widgets - STA travel and their desktop widgets would be a good example. The point is that what most brands (and the industry) are calling widgets are not widgets and could have been achieved in another, often simpler, way.

There has been an entire micro-industry created about widgets - I find this astonishing. Will we be having conferences about just widgets in 3 years time? I would argue not. Just as we won't be having conferences on the sole topic of social media either, and instead will see it firmly wrapped up within the psyche and practices of good digital marketers.

As an agency we talk about the term 'widgets' and we even build 'widgets', and I would argue we have some pretty sneaky uses for 'widgets'. But let's not lose sight of what widgets are - a new tactic that we can choose from to fulfill our chosen strategy.

In preparation for the talk I was chatting to a colleague on Gtalk about it. He came up with the perfect description of how most agencies end up getting into the world of widgets. Sometimes it's from proactive strategy, but there are many agency folks in Soho who I am sure will recognise this...

1. Client bored, feeling sleepy
2. Has coffee
   
3. Still bored
4. Boss demands budget be spent
5. Reads the word widget on RSS feed, not sure what it means
6. Client calls friend and asks what widget is
7. Calls Agency of Record and demands widget
8. Agency shows mock-ups of a bouncing widget
9. Client doesn't want to seem too eager and so send them back to the drawing board
10. Agency now shows mock-ups of something that bounces and rotates
11. Client has used Agency hours for this project
12. Agency implements
13. Client returns focus to TV and paid search campaigns