NextWidgets Blog » Marketing

NextWidgets featured in Internet World Business magazine

alexsavic — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:15:34 +0000

The latest print edition of the German magazine Internet World Business has a great feature on NextWidgets. In case German is not your strong suit, the article discusses the current set of NextWidgets products including transactional banners and Facebook widgets as well as our upcoming mobile offering.

The article also mentions our upcoming cooperation with PUBLICIS in Germany in regards to their AdTrinity banner optimization software, but more on that ‘officially’ in the coming weeks…

Below is a scan of the article. Our thanks a lot to the team at IWB for taking an interest in this technology.

Brand advertising and “Intent to Buy”

alexsavic — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:30:57 +0000

It’s always been intersting to me how far removed brand advertising can get from an actual purchase and how companies do, or in many cases do not, measure the performance of their brand campaigns. In a 2004 article on brand metrics by Scott Davis of Prophet consultancy, he mentions that in their surveys, only a third of companies had brand campaign performance measurement in place. Hopefully that number has improved over the last few years, but from what I can see, many brands are still only measuring the basic metrics that they used to back in the tv and billboard days, i.e conducting surveys on brand awareness, brand-recall and so on, without taking into account that on the web, the brand campaign can be much more linked to bottom-line performance (consumers purchasing the product).

Perhaps due to the tough economic situation at the moment, brand advertisers seem to be slowly catching on the performance mantra and are coming around to the idea that on the web, purchase intent is a key metric for web advertising as this interview by Daisy Whitney with Media Breaks CEO Keith Richman shows:

Obviously from our perspective, it would make a lot of sense to reduce that disconnect even further and go from seeking purchase intent to seeking an actual purchase on the spot, through the use of the NextWidgets transactional layer for brand advertising which embeds the ability to purchase goods & services right inside the banner itself, removing all of the friction between brand ad and actual purchase.

Advertising industry reaction to iAds

alexsavic — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 07:54:19 +0000

Some very interesting comments by Marc Ruxin, head of innovation at Universal McCann, on Apple’s new iAds advertising system found over on Beet.tv. Probably just like everyone in the mobile advertising industry, Marc wonders about the openness of the iAds system and to what extent competitive systems will be allowed to emerge. What is great for NextWidgets is that it seems that through the iAds announcement, more and more people within the advertising industry are coming to the conclusion that dispaly ads are not effective in their current form, with “abysmally low click-through, message recall and purchase intent rates” and that the solution, once isolated and simplified, is in “giving the consumer the best (ad) experience without interrupting the content experience the user has selected”. That’s spot-on ! Marc goes on to say that “the ability to have an ad experience that isn’t disruptive to content – that’s the right answer.” We couldn’t agree more, not just for mobile apps, but for web advertising also.

And here a few figures posted by TheNextWeb on the success of iAds for one developer over traditional mobile advertising. Looks like that in-app interaction really is model really is more interesting for consumers.

Nobody can explain it better

alexsavic — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:52:12 +0000

Listening to Steve talk about iAds is almost as if though he was doing a product demo for NextWidgets! There are so many similarities in the concept, like the notion that users don’t click on banner ads because they are taken away to some third party page and that advertising needs to be both interactive and emotional to be compelling for users, that it seems like a strong validation of our own concept when the ‘maestro’ himself is saying it. I might just play these video’s the next time I do a pitch

Gary V at Gov 2.0

alexsavic — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:00:03 +0000

What a great interview between Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary and Kathy Sierra. Gary is clearly a very smart guy and makes some great comments about online commerce and branding.

I’m sure Gary would be interested in the work that Hans Rosling did at GapMinder in visualising data.

Next10 Conference in Berlin next week

alexsavic — Sun, 09 May 2010 18:21:33 +0000

Very much looking forward to presenting NextWidgets at Next10 conference in Berlin next week. Very fitting for us that this year’s motto is ‘Game Changers’

Get in touch if you’ll be there: @nextwidgets

Impressions from The Next Web conference 2010

alexsavic — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:48:27 +0000

It’s Monday evening and I’ve only just recovered enough from The Next Web conference to be able to write this blog post. I don’t know whether it was the intense party vibe at the conference or on Queen’s day that followed it, but now I know for sure, that I’m just a lightweight compared to people like Patrick, Zee & Boris and all the other world-class rockers from Amsterdam.

The Next Web is one of the largest internet conferences in Europe and was being hosted for the fifth time this year. We applied to present there as part of the PayPal X Startup Rally which saw 245 companies apply, of which 25 were selected to demo their products on stage.

The conference took place over three days and featured some really awesome keynote’s such as the opening speech by Robert Cailliau discussing the past and future of the web, proper coding and the need to control population growth! Tim Ferris gave a fun presentation on an unusual topic; how to deal with ‘haters’, while Florie Brizel educated all of us on how mobile phones are changing our world and the need for a new social science called ‘mobilology’. Evan Roth was also amongst the top keynotes for me, giving us an intro into the Free Art & Technology movement and how to piggyback onto hype trends to deliver a social message.

A number of companies outside the Startup Rally also had a chance to present their products, such as dutch social network Hyves and their new integrated payment system that allows Hyves members to transfer money to each other and even pay in bars with through their Hyves account. Another real winner in my opinion was the presentation of Waze, which is an amazing crowd-sourced mapping project presented impeccably by Fej Schmuelevitz.

Large companies were also present, with Microsoft previewing their new Messenger which had a whole bunch of cool collaboration features such as the ability to view websites, videos and photos with your friends through messenger as well as announcing the Messenger connect product. PayPal also announced the open beta for the new ‘Library for iPhone’ which makes it much easier for iPhone developers to install the Pay with PayPal feature into their apps.

As for the Startup Rally, it was so much fun to present NextWidgets in front of such a large audience, and despite that we didn’t win, I came away from the experience with great feedback and ideas on improving our product. One of the most intense moments came after the 5 minute presentation when the jury was able to ask questions and when Werner Vogels, one of the judges and the CTO of Amazon.com, described distributed e-commerce as untrustworthy and “dangerous for users”. I really appreciate Werner’s comments and I think he has a very good point in the fact that all transactional widgets should have better authentication features. I’ll be doing a separate blog post this week about the security aspects of distributed e-commerce, our current position and our plans in this respect for the future.

Just to finish off this recap, here are a couple of funny interviews I was asked to give by yubby.com and even a one line video pitch for deLiftPitch:

The power of video blogging

alexsavic — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:03:31 +0000

If there was any doubt about what kind of influence any single person on the internet can have, then this article on The Next Web will clearly show that as long as the content and subject matter is interesting, a video blog can have tremendous pull within the community.

This really supports our idea that word-of-mouth recommendations are going to be a more important marketing tool in the future.

Overstock Drugstore issues press release for Facebook shop

alexsavic — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:57:46 +0000

We’re very happy this morning about the press release issued yesterday by one of our merchant partners, OverstockDrugstore.com.

Here is the intro paragraph:

“Overstock Drugstore Debuts First ‘Viral E-commerce’ Application on Facebook

Developed by NextWidgets.com, the Overstock Drugstore Facebook application is a version of the Overstock Drugstore online shop customized for Facebook and embedded on the Overstock Drugstore Fan Page within a separate ‘shopping tab’. Beyond the standard shopping experience, any visitor to the Overstock Drugstore shop can click the ‘Embed to my profile’ button inside the application, which allows them to instantly install the shop onto their own Facebook profile page. By embedding the store, the customer becomes an affiliate and can invite their entire network of friends to shop on their profile page, receiving a commission on every sale made through their store.”

You can read the full text on PRWeb

Cross-platform development using Adobe Flash

alexsavic — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:20:42 +0000

Yesterday we posted an update about our latest developments with Flash, with part of the question being whether flash would even have a future considering the lack of support from Apple. Today, Robert Scoble posted an interview featuring two Adobe executives showing off some very cool examples of how well Flash works on mobile devices and cementing it as the platform of choice for easy cross-platform development. Have a look at the video :