Million Dollar Widget

No, not as in "it cost a million dollars to produce this widget," but as in "we got a million bucks of response from this widget."

Let’s back up a minute. Here’s the backstory: Warner Brothers came to us to help promote their new animated movie: Batman Gotham Knight. This usually means that we create a microsite and a MySpace presence. This time, however, we added a Facebook presence—and a relatively full-featured widget:

The widget allowed people to see the trailer, browse stills, and find out more about the movie, and it had an interesting social feature: When you installed the widget, you became a member of The Concerned Citizens of Gotham City. The more people who installed the widget, the brighter the Bat-signal would glow.

Pretty cool, huh? But what is much, much cooler are the numbers the widget generated:

• Before the launch of the movie, the widget generated nearly 1MM pageviews
• As of this writing, it has generated over 1.4MM pageviews

Now remember: these are pageviews, not impressions. This means that nearly 1MM more interactions were facilitated by the widget before the launch of the movie—and, even after launch, with no additional investment in the campaign, the numbers continue to grow!

Here are a few striking things we noticed:

1. The widget killed the microsite, both in terms of unique users and pageviews. Wait. Let’s repeat that: the widget beat the microsite for unique users and pageviews. These are people who might never have bothered to come to the Batman Gotham Knight microsite—and a real testimonial to the need to "get out where the people are," rather than trying to bring them to your site.

2. The widget performed about as well as a million-dollar paid media buy. To drive 1MM clickthroughs to your site, you’re looking at $500K-2MM for a typical AdWords program. Or, $1.2MM for a network banner buy with $1.20CPM and 0.1% clickthrough. Or $1MM for targeted online ads with $10CPM and 1% clickthrough.

3. The numbers keep growing, even after the campaign has ended. With a media buy, when the spending stops, your media stops. Period. End of story. With a popular widget "in the wild" on social networks, the numbers continue to grow.

"Well, yeah, that’s cool," you might be saying. "But our audience is older/less hip/not on the social networks/won’t use widgets."

Oh really? Let us introduce you to two statistics you might find interesting:

• Widgets have a 67% reach across the worldwide internet audience, according to ComScore Widget Metrix
• Over 40% of moms are on MySpace

Now, sit back, think about your brand and what you might be able to offer in a widget. And think what a long-term, persistently growing, permanent presence in the social spaces and blogosphere might do for your results.

Welcome to the world of today—a world where all the rules are changing.

Posted by September 13th, 2008 | by Jason | Permalink