beta

Last week at the excellent TC50 event - a new company launched - adgregate-markets - claiming to be the first to market with a transactional widget. [really liked the distributed commerce comment at the start of their pitch]

The esteemed panelists: Entrepreneur, Marc Andreessen; MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe; Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com; Entrepreneur Yossi Vardi; and Ash Patel, Yahoo’s executive vice president of the Audience division - had the following comments [via Techcrunch post]

"Not too much was said about Adgregate markets because each panelist agreed on the most important element of any startup: it’s a great idea that will make money and address a need in the market. Chris DeWolfe at MySpace was quick to point out that Adgregate Markets’ idea could be used anywhere on the Web and has a strong business model in place that would attract publishers and advertisers, alike."

InternetRetailing has more indepth analysis and also covers other activity in the market from PayPal Storefront Widget and Tailgate Technologies

At nooked labs - we've debated the merits of enabling folks to complete the transaction within a shopping widget - and although technically possible - and on our roadmap - its not top of the agenda for our retailer or publisher partners - due to the many questions it raises.

We'd love to get your thoughts - and we've done a quick poll on transactional widgets.

We've heard lots of talk about widget marketing, widget advertising, widget monetization - but I recently went back over an old meme from a few years ago - "Sell Side Advertising" - which started off in some blog posts by John Battelle and Ross Mayfield.

Reading the article from John - this section does sound familar.

"Once the ads (insert widgets here) are let loose, here’s the cool catch - ANYONE who sees those ads can cut and paste them, just like a link, into their own sites (providing their sites conform to the guidelines the ad explicates in its tags). The ads track their own progress, and through feeds they “talk” to their “owner” - the advertiser (or their agent/agency). These feeds report back on who has pasted the ad into what sites, how many clicks that publisher has delivered, and how much juice is left in the ad’s bank account. The ad propagates until it runs out of money, then it… disappears! If the ad is working, the advertiser can fill up the tank with more money and let it ride."

Sounds like widgets.

Why is Sell Side Advertising Important

John Battelle - "I love this model because it's viral and it's publisher driven"

Jeff Jarvis "Let the consumers create the ads - Put the consumer in control." "A consumer who buys your product sells it for you to another consumer and you the marketer paid nothing to market it. OK, dream on."

Kevin Kelly - "The cool idea is that ads can now be packaged as little widgets that you can drag and drop onto your blog or website, as easy as it is to embed a YouTube video. This ease of placing ads has rekindled speculation about a new form of advertising that ought to be."

Fred Wilson - "I am convinced that this is how the market is going to evolve. But we still have a pretty closed system where the market can't work perfectly - There will come a time, and not so long from now, when advertisers will just post their ads, plus some data about them, and how they want them to perform, and how much they are willing to pay for leads generated by them, and the net will do the rest - There is a huge imbalance between the demand for pay for performance advertising and the ability to meet it right now. And the reason is that there are huge inefficiencies in the market. "

Whats the checklist for Sell Side Advertising solution [based on these articles]

1. Ads are on the net - where they can easily be found, or on their own sites

2. Ads are tagged with information supplied by the advertiser - who they are attempting to reach, advertising rate [cpc, etc]

3. People can cut and paste the ads - just like a link, into their own sites

4. Ads track their own progress, and through feeds they "talk" to their "owner"

5. Report back on who has pasted the ad into what sites, how many clicks that publisher has delivered, and how much juice is left in the ad's bank account.

6. Ad propagates until it runs out of money, then it... disappears!

7. Tracks where the Ad came from - remunerated for the network of influence.

Bring it back to 2008 - the checklist now looks like

1. Widgets are available - but let the consumer build them - control of look + feel, products, etc.

2. Widgets are tagged with information - income value to publisher, some t+c's around widget usage

3. Widgets support "cut and paste" - especially with the variety of platforms available

4. Widgets report back on progress - installs, impressions, clicks, etc - on what networks

5. Widget distribution rewards the influencers - they gain additional revenue/ranking for their social graph

To drive a self-serve sell-side advertising - you need feeds of advertisers product data - which requires a feedcommerce platform.

The nooked product checklist is almost done for sell side advertising - check out our latest update to the nooked service

We recently pushed live our "feedshop" widget live.

This shopping widget was developed by one of our team, John Blackbourn, using our feedcommerce platform APIs and using Adobe Air for widget development.

The initial goals was simple - build an exemplary widget marketing application on our platform - but it's proven popular with folks - so we decided to push out into the wilds.

The shopping widget is a useful utility for finding shopping deals from lots of retailers - enabling personalized commerce feeds.

With some more work [US retailer data, Zip Code targetting] we'll also keep Mike Arrington happy - he wanted Tailored Local Offers (via RSS) but I guess we will do that without the hassle of understanding RSS.

Please download the widget - and provide us with some feedback.