Two top execs from Clearspring and Gigya offer a glimpse at what the future holds for widgets and how to capitalize on this rapidly growing trend.

Without question, widgets have emerged as the leading vehicles to provide new digital marketing and publishing opportunities, commonly, but not exclusively, attached to social networks. And while many marketers are eager to explore this burgeoning platform, the range of options to create, distribute and measure widget campaigns in light of a rapidly changing online media environment can seem daunting.

To help lend some insight and clarity on the state of the widget space, I spoke with Hooman Radfar, CEO and co-founder of Clearspring, and Ben Pashman, VP of business development for Gigya, for a glimpse at what the future holds for widgets.

iMedia: Are you seeing a lot of confusion in the marketplace regarding widgets, how they can be produced, utilized, measured, etc?

Radfar: This space is evolving quickly, so there is no question that there is some confusion. What is success? Is it the number of installs or engagements? What tools are available? That being said, I think people are really starting to get it as the value chain begins to emerge. Last year, the market was characterized by early adopters experimenting to understand the medium. I think this year you are going to see some serious movement from publishers and advertisers making aggressive spends against this category.

I believe that our [Clearspring] position as the original one-stop-shop widget platform and service provider for the media space has helped us gain some serious advantages. Our ability to enable widgets to be shared across social networks, start pages, blogs and the desktop, coupled with our analytics and reporting platform, provide a 360-degree solution for people who are serious about optimizing the performance of distributed content. This enables our clients to focus on what they do best -- building great brands and content. 

Pashman: Yes, there is confusion. I hear questions every day such as what are best practices behind building a successful widget, how do you ensure a significant number of users actually embed and share a widget, what metrics are most important for measuring campaign effectiveness for social media or widget campaigns? Much of the confusion is coming simply from the terminology. Words such as distribution, network, platform application and even "widget" are used differently by different companies in the widget space. We can do a better job as an industry getting on the same page to clear up much of this confusion. 

The problem advertisers face, however, is that they have no idea if and when users will actually see and share their widget, even if they've invested a huge amount of money to build it. The opportunity we [Gigya] offer advertisers is to buy widget installs in a specific timeframe and for a specific budget. This allows advertisers to execute on a dedicated brand widget campaign (as opposed to a sponsored widget campaign) the same way they do a traditional online ad buy, aligning it with an overarching campaign or promotion. We are platform-agnostic, so even if an advertiser has built a widget on another company's widget development platform, it is still a great candidate for running on the Gigya network to increase the number of installs to user pages.

iMedia: Can you cite some examples of how top marketers and publishers are currently using your platform? What have been the signature executions to date? 

Radfar: My recent favorite was the campaign for the movie "Cloverfield." The studio leveraged our platform and services to create a first-of-a-kind viral contest. In the contest, the fan that spreads the trailer the most wins a hometown screening of "Cloverfield." This campaign leveraged our creative services to build the widget, our robust analytics engine to measure the campaign, our sharing tools to make the widget viral, and our reporting API to show users how they were doing. The exposure to the widget has been amazing.

Another example of an interesting implementation was between a publisher and advertiser. Fox Television recently created the "Futurama" widget and ran an advertising sponsorship with us via Virgin Mobile. Fox TV extends its brand to the Web 2.0 world and Virgin Mobile hits its target audience in a hard-to-reach medium.

Pashman: Gigya has produced widgets and run distribution campaigns for several big-name entertainment companies including MTV, Comedy Central and others. But we had a widget campaign launch in January for Kimberly Clarke that is unique in many ways and should get the industry buzzing. The TV-like quality of the content is the first thing you will notice (along with the dancing toilet paper). In this case, the widget is a cornerstone of the online integration with both print and broadcast.

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