Last week I had the opportunity to interview Tony Zito, the CEO for mediaFORGE, a company that “has widgets comin’ out their ads.” More to the point, mediaFORGE creates widgets as a new means of display advertising. What that means is they don’t do online advertising the way most people do. Don’t ask them to create a banner ad for you. They won’t do it. They’ll give you a widget instead…and you’ll be glad they did. According to Zito, their widgets perform with a conversion rate that’s three to five times higher than standard banner ads. You can see some of their widgets on their showcase page.

Think about that conversion rate over standard banner ads…three to five times more conversions. So if you’re getting a 3% conversion rate now, you could be getting 9% or even a 15% conversion rate by simply ditching the ads that people don’t like anyway for something they’ll engage and act on. Zito thinks this is the next phase of display ads. I happen to agree. We know banner ads don’t work. Even stats from four years ago show they haven’t been working for a while.

Widgets seemed to really take off last year as more marketers looked to them for sales and promotions. According to Zito, “last year was the year of the widget, but this year is the year of ‘how do we monetize the widget?’” For all the interest marketers are showing for new media marketing opportunities, the inevitable question is: “Ok, now what? When does this start making money for us?” That’s a question that all social media marketers are dealing with and one that mediaFORGE seems to be providing an answer for.

What I’ve personally be perplexed by for a while now is that if not banner ads, what do you recommend for mere display ad purposes? I think Zito and mediaFORGE are going down the right road. The widgets provide something that has value to the customer or prospect. It allows a person to engage an ad rather than simply being interrupted. I don’t know for sure if widgets are the next wave of display ads, but it sure seems like it’s going the right direction.

Tags: digital marketing, mediaFORGE, online advertising, social media marketing, Tony Zito, widget marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, new media, new media marketing, social media marketing, widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.