After two days at OMMA, where “widget” seemed to be every other word spoken, I was just struck by a bone jarring irony. While I praised CNBC’s Fast Money widget for its features and functionality, I can’t help but laugh my a&& off watching a television commercial promoting their widget.
TV commercials to promote widgets? Col. Kurtz said it best, “The horror…..the horror!” What a change of heart in just 24 hours.
Mediapost’s Joe Mandese is leading a panel discussion on “nomadic consumers and nomadic media,” with Alan Cohen from Initiative, Cathleen Campe from RPA, Shawn Gold from Social Approach (and formerly MySpace) Ed Montes of MediaContacts and Scott Sorokin from Carat.
Kicking off the panel, for some reason, is a check in on which candidate the panelists are endorsing. A good laugh from “Obama probably looks better than Hillary at 3 in the morning.”
Widgets again? Yep. Jeez. I’ve tuned out for a bit. Too much widget chat at the show, but I’ve had some healthy conversations with people about them and how they may put an emphasis back on Marketing 101. What are your goals, and does a widget help you achieve them? But we digress….
The core issue is media fragmentation, reach and frequency, and the thinking that needs to go into developing a holistic marketing plan rather than just a media plan (see previous post).
Radio used to be scary because there were 1,000 radio stations. Now the issue has magnified. But social media enables consumers to say “I’m not going to have ads that I don’t want on my Facebook page.”
But there’s still a built in fall back that TV has reach and is a safety vehicle for marketers. “Broadcast is dead is one of the silliest things people are saying right now.”
Can I get an AMEN?!?! Ross Levinsohn from Velocity Interactive Group just said that the widget market will be dramatically consolidated in 12-18 months as a standalone concept. Widgets are tools for distributing viral content, and there will be a huge shakeout, leaving just the companies that do it well.
What is content anyway? Does “poking” someone on Facebook equal content? What about a “tweet” on Twitter? Blending communication and content spawns new forms of media that need to be looked at differently. “Blogging is content, but sending the same information via twitter isn’t quite the same thing.”
Velocity won’t be investing in other social networks or portals. They are looking forward to what’s next, rather than competitors to current market leaders such as YouTube, MySpace & Facebook or the portals. Up next for them is finding “focused consumers.” Being able to target video well will be key to justifying the money spent in online video. When that happens, really big dollars will flow into online video.
For any of you who have heard me rant about widgets lately, you should know that I found some personal vindication tonight watching CNBC’s Fast Money when this little gem came on…
By the way, the show has plenty of web-extra video, including longer form clips of nearly every segment of that day’s show in their Rapid Recap.
Here’s a look at the widget for yourselves.
But for all of us in the industry, what is so tough to comprehend about widgets? Ok, you want a portable rich media unit that plays video and drives traffic back to your main site to sign up for newsletters or podcasts. And you want to measure total embeds, total minutes of video delivered across each distribution platform, sign-ups for the newsletters and downloads of podcasts. You’d like to look look at the average abandonment point where people are dropping off so you can trim the video segments to deliver an optimized user experience.
Which one of those are you going to call your primary success metric, secondary success metrics, and did you achieve them or not? At end end of the day, is the total number of minutes of video content of the “Fast Money” show viewed, aggregated across all of the platforms, the most important measure? If, after a week, there is a drop off of in watching video through the widget, is it a failure?
With all of these moving parts - which differ for each vertical category of advertisers and niche content - why are people looking for ‘one’ metric - engagement - to replace the universal CTR? I’m not suggesting that CTR should stick around, but we need to accept the fact that online media has gotten a lot more complicated than it ever has been, and we should treat it and talk about it as such. But I digress….
Nice job CNBC. Clean, functional widget that meets your goals. Too bad that co-host Jeff Macke called it a virus, and regular contributor Tim Seymour explained why it shouldn’t be called a widget to begin with. (Tim - I’m with you, buddy!) But I hope you factor that into account when you measure total downloads and evaluate the results.
Does anyone care whether we call it a “podcast” or an “mp3″ of something? I’m currently browsing the Zune Marketplace looking for some new podcasts, but I realized its mostly short versions of traditional media (The Today Show Podcast), and the usual, mass distributed webisodes like Ask A Ninja.
My question….does the “buzzword” get in the way of peope’s understanding of the medium? People are asking about widgets without knowing what they are or how to measure their success. Seems a little “horse before the cart” to me. And now looking at all the podcasts available from Zune Marketplace and iTunes, are people really confused by their nomenclature? Or do they get the fact that anyone can make an audio recording of video interview available for download to be viewed on multiple devices? I’m not actually planning on watching HBO’s “In Treatment” on my Zune. I plan on watching on my PC, but Ill grab it through the Zune Marketplace….for free.
Not sure why this is bugging me, other than the fact that I need different settings for downloading and syncing my podcasts than my regular music. PITA.
Same with widgets. Will someone please bring a little thought into the process? Or just admit they want to dabble with a new medium.
What are you using to tag your audio files these days, anyway? I’ve spent most of this weekend updating and standardizing album art and setlists so they play in chronological order while maintaining my preferred file naming convention (artist/album/song - artist.mp3).
End holiday rant.
