Brands that are truly embracing todays world of social media are experimenting with widgets because they know that people will evangelize and spread their love of a brand if given the tools to do so. One good example is the Purina Pet Weather Widget.
The one thing that I am seeing very little of is actual advertising in widgets. With the popularity of widgets growing like wildfire, I suspect that media companies who are creating these widgets will start selling a portion of the space to advertisers. Here is the first example that I have found:
Notice the Lenovo Sponsorship at the top.
They also produce some video highlight widgets with ads from Sprite in their Video Blog, but the code didn't work right. Here is an image of it on the left.
I think that there will be a few challenges for this type of advertising. First of all is size. Widgets are small to begin with, so adding advertisements runs the risk of seriously hurting the experience.
The second challenge will be my Theory of Widget Advertising Elasticity and its affect on widget adoption. As the % of space allocated to advertising increases, it will decrease the willingness of publishers to place that widget on their site. This is a very important thing for media properties to consider and I believe it is the main reason we aren't seeing much of it yet.
Due to the fact that the NBA is a very premium content owner and you cannot get this content any other way, I think they have a very high widget ad elasticity. Therefore, these ads are probably not impacting their adoption by bloggers and other publishers.
If you notice any other widgets with ads like this, let me know. I want to keep a close eye on this topic.
More to come...
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