Last Night Google announced that they were rolling out a revolutionary new ad format for both their Adwords advertisers as well as their Adsense affiliates. These new ads will be in widget form, much like the gadgets you can put on your IGoogle homepage. They will be interactive, feature rich media content, and all allow the advertiser to track how well they are doing.
Benefits to Publishers and Website Visitors:
This will give Adsense publishers yet another great way to earn money from their content, while providing their visitors with something at least more entertaining then the banner ads we are all used to seeing.
Benefits to Advertisers:
These new widget ads will take the online advertising market in a whole new direction. With ad blocking software becoming more and more frequent now-a-days, these new ads should slip by the filters. Instead of viewers seeing ads as a nuisanc, they will view them as just a part of their internet experience. Advertisers get unique tracking on the ads to see how well they perform, and the widget format will create a community type atmosphere between the advertiser and viewers.
Some analysts and early advertisers who have tested the ads with consumers said the capacity to measure the effectiveness of so-called rich media advertising is a technology breakthrough for the industry that bolsters Google’s push into the corporate brand market.
“Gadget Ads is very far reaching,” said Andrew Frank, an online advertising analyst with market research firm Gartner Inc. “This is the platform that Google is going to build all their cross-media advertising services upon,” he said.
“We view this as a way to create an environment where the Internet is being supplied by truly useful advertising,” said Christian Oestlien, a business product manager for Google.