NextWidgets Blog

We’ve entered Vator Splash competition

alexsavic — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:38:58 +0000

We’ve entered the Vator.tv Splash competition. If we are able to come in the top 20 of popular voting, we get a chance to present NextWidgets at the Vator Splash event in San Francisco on the 30th of September. Thanks a lot for voting for us!

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.

eBay CEO discusses multi-device shopping

alexsavic — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:33:52 +0000

A good explenation by eBay CEO John Donahoe on how consumers are adapting usage patterns to a mobile, mutli-device world. Interesting times ahead for e-commerce:

HTML5 Adoption By Publishers

alexsavic — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:21:18 +0000

A great demo of what’s possible in the publishing space with HTML5

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.

Side-Tab Widgets Announced at Next10 Conference

alexsavic — Thu, 13 May 2010 01:57:29 +0000

Today we officially announced the newest NextWidgets feature upgrade, the Side-Tab Widget.

Press Release on PRDoc.com

Here is a demo page . (WD is used for illustration purposes only on this page).

We believe this is a totally unique form of transactional banner and would love to hear your opinions about it.

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