By Ken Liebeskind
SUNNYVALE, CALIF. --The use of widgets is growing and with it comes a rise in video advertising because video is such an important element of widgets. Ori Soen, CEO of MuseStorm, a company that works with marketers and publishers to produce and distribute widgets, discusses how agencies and marketers can add videos to their widgets and how important it is for them to include video in their widgets for high impact.
iSPOT: MuseStorm authors, delivers and measures widgets. Can you explain how it performs each of those functions.
Soen: We allow marketers and agencies to produce widgets through our production studio, which is a browser based interface that allows customers to put together a widget, MySpace or Facebook application or a desktop widget. We’re the only platform that has a studio that allows customers to produce widgets without having to program them. The studio lets you create a widget and distribute it so you don’t have to recreate your widget for each distribution channel. If you’re a marketer and you want to have your message in front of users on Facebook or anywhere on the web you can create one widget and then publish it wherever you want.
iSPOT: How do marketers use the studio?
Soen: Agencies and marketers can log in and produce their widgets. They open an account, and when they log in, the browser provides them with an interface that’s similar to PowerPoint to put together an application for their widgets.
iSPOT: How do you measure the widgets?
Soen: After we produce the widgets our servers host them and serve them, it’s very similar to an ad serving infrastructure like DoubleClick where every time someone accesses the application our infrastructure tracks every event. You can produce a widget on our platform, serve it through our infrastructure and get detailed analytics about how many people have seen it, how many unique users have seen it and how many times they’ve actively interacted. You know how many users have played the video or scrolled through the text. You get detailed analytics and when we talk about video advertising it provides an infrastructure for detailed targeting.
iSPOT: How can clients integrate video into their widgets?
Soen: Let me give you a short background on why companies use widgets that gives us a context to talk about video. There are two types of widgets. The first type is for publishers who want to package their content in a format that is convenient for end users to grab and play somewhere else. Users are tuning out mainstream websites and spending more time on social networks and alternative blogs, so if you’re a publisher with a lot of content you have a problem where users don’t go back to your site. If you’re smart, you’ll provide them with a widget so they can grab the content and put it on their pages, which allows them to view it later and let their friends view it. The other type of widget is for branding and marketing. Companies want to be able to distribute their message as part of an online advertising campaign so they produce a widget with branded content, including video. They seed it through their site or other location and people grab it and put it on their pages so they can interact with it later and see the content.
iSPOT: Let’s concentrate on the second example because it’s advertising/marketing related.
Soen: If you’re a marketer or advertiser you know video is king on the web and you understand you need to have video as a major part of every campaign. We recommend that video be included as a major component of branded content on widgets. We’ve seen great numbers regarding user interaction when video is involved.
iSPOT: What’s involved in getting video incorporated into a widget?
Soen: Our platform is self service and we train customers to produce widgets on their own. They grab video components onto this application and tell our platform where to find the video. We don’t host video, it’s hosted on the customer’s server so they will point the application to that location so when it loads on a Facebook profile or a blog or a desktop it knows where to find the video to stream it from the advertiser’s original site. Flash video is the format used because the Flash player is installed and supported by 98 percent of browsers in the world.
iSPOT: How do you think playing videos in widgets differs from playing video in other online environments?
Soen: If you have a website you can allocate the exact page to display video and when you produce a widget it’s a smaller component and you have to scale down your video so it fits. When they grab the widget it has to fit the structure of their blog, so it has to be a small component, a 300 x 250 or maybe a little larger but it’s not going to be a 640 x 480 unit where video gets prime real estate because blogs have lots of other content on them. When you produce video for widgets you have to be careful to scale it down to convey your message in an effective way. A benefit of playing videos with widgets is that you can update your widget with new video to keep it fresh. End users realize you’ll update your widget with new video so they put it on their blog.
iSPOT: Do you think the use of widgets will play a role in increasing the use of online video advertising?
Soen: Definitely, I’ll give you a case study that demonstrates the point. We worked with one of the largest record labels to promote an album from a new artist. They had a website for the artist that played videos clips and then they produced a widget and put it on a MySpace page and three days later tens of thousands of users grabbed it and embedded it on their MySpace pages. It had exclusive video of the artist, so the widget increased the consumption of video.
iSPOT: Who was the client in this case?
Soen: DTP Records, a Def Jam label and the artist was Bobby Valentino.
iSPOT: Can you mention other clients?
Soen: CBS, Simon & Schuster, Universal Music and more. S&S is a good example of a book publisher that is utilizing video with widgets to drive sales and awareness of new books. They have bookvideo.tv where they interview authors and they put a widget around playing video content for the books. You grab it and you can get more information about the books and interviews with the authors so it provides a lot of visibility and awareness.
iSPOT: How fast do you think the use of widgets is growing and what’s your role in making that happen?
Soen: Widgets have been exploding in terms of popularity, you can see the Comscore data that tracks widgets. Millions of users have embedded widgets on their blogs and social networks. Our role is simple. We’re the first platform that gives marketers and advertisers an end to end solution. If you don’t use a service like ours you have to develop and produce your own widget, which is a very difficult process. We lower the barrier to entry and the ability to maintain a campaign over time. Widgets are a unique vehicle because users will put them on a page so when a marketer’s campaign ends, users have already embedded their content onto their page. We advocate that marketers should maintain their widgets so they can extend their relationship with users. They should push new videos out to engage users. Our platform does this very effectively because you don’t have to reprogram the widget, you can go in and reconfigure it and add content, so it’s easy to maintain a relationship with users.
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