Widgets are designed to allow an advertiser to provide the user with a unique interactive experience, essentially different to the normal advertising avenues available. A game of football penalties played with a sports company branded ball or a picture of a car which changes when different colour or performance options are selected are just two examples of how an advertisement in widget form could be utilised.
Many widgets in use today employ a simple game or video format, but a major feature of this new advertising technique is the ability for the widgets to call on information from other sources and display it for the user to see.
An example of this form of widget could be an advertisement for a chain of cinemas which reads the user's IP address and displays cinema listings that are highly relevant to the customer. The user could then click on the movie in which they're interested and book tickets via the chain's website. These flashier and more colourful advertisements are more attractive to big advertisers due to the fact that they can further a brand experience much more than a text ad can.
Another big advantage of widgets is that they can be displayed on any page, anywhere on the internet. This has led to personalised homepages such as iGoogle, to which users can add a plethora of widgets, so that they can get all of their information in one place. Users are also keen on adding widgets to social networking profile pages, as seen recently with the launch of applications for Facebook.
Business product manager at Google, Christian Oestlein, puts it very simply when he says:
"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."
Advertisers will bid on keywords in much the same way as they bid on text ads through the Google AdWords interface, but effectiveness cannot be thoroughly seen based on click-through rates. As a result, Google will provide a way to measure their effectiveness through levels of interaction instead.
