Google’s new Gadget Ads are creating quite a buzz as the widget based advertising program is unveiled…
San Francisco — Google Inc. on Wednesday unveiled a new graphic ad format dubbed as “Google Gadget Ads,” Internet’s interactive rich media ads that are delivered through feeds to thousands of “widgets,” as a way to deliver eye-catching ads that have the dynamism of television but also the Web interactivity that lets users choose what they see.
“Gadget Ads will provide advertisers with the tools to create and serve widget ads on Google’s AdSense platform.”
The Internet giant’s new technology can be used to create a variety of ads that can be distributed across Google’s web sites, as well as a network of Google-affiliated sites.
Google has already signed up a group of large advertisers to create their own “gadgets,” the company’s term for widgets. The gadgets can include video, images, constantly updated data feeds, and mini versions of entire web sites.
“The search giant tested the format with a few advertisers, including Intel, Honda, Pepsi and Six Flags. For example, Intel used Gadget Ads as part of its larger Centrino Duo campaign.”
The move represents Google’s first attempt to make money off a trend that the online search leader has helped popularize. The Mountain View-based company has for two years offered a platform showcasing small modules, known generally as widgets, which blends data, text, images and software programs.
Google users can now select from more than 14,000 widgets — or, as Google uniquely calls them, “gadgets” — that can be planted on a personalized version of the search engine’s Web site.
This addition is a push by Google to get bigger advertisers who want hip and effective alternatives to the traditional forms of advertising. According to comScore, more than 87 million people, or over 48% of internet users in the U.S. use widgets.
Christian Oestlien, a business product manager for Google stated to The New York Times, “Consumers are pulling in content from multiple sources. It is what we are calling the componentization of the Web. The Web is sort of breaking apart into smaller pieces.”
Google’s new ads will help the company tap into the increasingly viral manner in which audio, video and data content is being distributed across the Internet. The growing use of RSS feeds and widgets–which enable Internet users to embed small content windows on third-party pages–means that companies no longer exclusively control the content that appears on their websites.
Some of the features are similar to the dynamic interactive ads that Google has recently released on YouTube videos at: http://redherring.com/Home/22624.
The ads are built with Flash, Java, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or a combination of languages, and are designed to look and feel more like Web content than advertising.
The ads are served across the Google content network and compete with other forms of advertising — text, display ads and video ads — for placement based on context. Advertisers can choose a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression pricing model, and are able to target users based on location, demographics and other factors. The ads are served to widgets on iGoogle customized home pages.
“The introduction of this new advertising format provides advertisers and agencies worldwide with an imaginative, dynamic way to interact with consumers,” said Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management.
Other influential high-tech companies like Yahoo Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. also have helped turn the Internet into a widget factory. And Google is not the first to try to commercialize widgets.
About 87 million people in the United States used an online widget in June, according to the research firm comScore Media Metrix.
Some analysts and early advertisers who have tested the ads with consumers said the capacity to measure the effectiveness of so-called rich media advertising is a technology breakthrough for the industry that bolsters Google’s push into the corporate brand market.
“Gadget Ads is very far reaching,” said Andrew Frank, an online advertising analyst with market research firm Gartner Inc. “This is the platform that Google is going to build all their cross-media advertising services upon,” he said.
Advertisers can embed PayPal or Google Checkout online payments function into Google’s ad gadgets, which would let customers buy products and service through the widgets.
Advertisers that have already tried Google’s new ad gadgets include Honda, Intel, Nissan, Pepsi’s Sierra Mist, and Viacom’s Paramount Vantage. One Intel ad lets users play the game “Pong” using an Intel laptop.
In another example, Google’s interactive ad gadget lets users view various parts of the inside of a Nissan car, as well as enter a zip code to get a real-time traffic map.
See examples here:
http://www.google.com/adwords/gadgetads/gallery.html
The ad widgets represent Google’s latest attempt to create other marketing vehicles besides the text-based ad links that generate most of its profits.
Oestlien also said to The Times, “We are not trying to monetize every single event that happens in a creative,” he continued that Google would like advertisers “to make rich creative ads that are really useful to the end user.”
The marketers that use Gadget Ads will only pay for the ads that run in Google’s network and not any that are saved or downloaded by users.
Separately, Google has hired Andy Berndt, co-president of the New York office of Ogilvy & Mather, a unit of WPP Group Plc, in a move that could prove controversial among ad agencies, who fears Google, may increasingly compete with them.
Berndt will be joining Google later this year as the managing director of the “Google Creative Lab,” which develops Google’s own advertising for business and consumer markets and works with other creative agencies in developing advertising using Google advertising services.