Or Widgetize.
This is sort of the point of a really interesting blog post from last week in Neil Kennedy’s blog.
The era of flashing, ridiculous looking banner ads will now be replaced by forms, games (beyond that of shooting the duck for lower insurance rates in some cheesy Flash game), and most importantly, actual stores. Google is rolling out Gadgets for adsense, leveraging its Google Gadgets for creating more powerful ad content.
From our perspective, this is awesome. We just recently improved the functionality of our Google Gadget transformer, and not a moment too soon (you can now have forms and fully interactive features). Think of a Google Gadget that searches your small business…take a company I randomly found called MegaToners, for instance. They’re an online retailer of copier and fax supplies, running their operation through a Yahoo! store. Well, it was a no-brainer to make a quick Gadget out of their catalog: click here to check it out by adding it to your iGoogle.
My guess is that a company like this probably never thought of making an ad that looks like this. Nor could they do it without some serious programming before services like Dapper came about. The possibilities for the long tail of small businesses like this are astounding, and this idea is a another great example of how Dapper is enabling marketers to take marketing back from the IT people.
Suggestions appreciated…and go ahead and make a Gadget or widget for your store.
