It didn’t take long after advent of the internet for marketers to look at it as a medium for advertising. And as most creators do when they see a new medium, they create for that new medium using the techniques and approaches that have served them well in more established mediums. In our specific example this means that marketers essentially converted billboards into banner ads and 30 second TV commercials into viral videos (or into 15 second TV commercials run uninterruptible before other people’s viral videos).

As happens with any new medium, after an initial phase of exuberance and random exploration, the creators start to learn the intricacies of the medium. And the internet, due to its fundamental identity as an enormous piece of distributed, networked, software has intricacies aplenty. They’re relatively well known but worth recounting:

• creation is cheap to free, and open to all
• distribution is cheap to free, and open to all
• interactivity is the default

These properties are being understood by marketers more and more every day. But our collective understanding is far from complete. In many cases marketers understand how sharing and social media can amplify their messages, but still end up delivering their messages in the form of billboards and television spots adapted for the internet. And to a certain extent the properties on the web are to blame.

Online businesses whose revenue comes from advertising look for standardization and scale in order to grow. Standardization and scale (as in most mediums) can’t help but lead to some degree of homogeneity and lack of authenticity. Filling rectangles on the web with banners touting your product has long been suspected as not the most effective means of communicating with an online audience. The logical next step is to add interactivity to those banners. However shooting ducks in a banner ad is not exactly earth-shaking innovation.

The next innovation was seemingly innocuous, but in fact much more powerful than most people realized. The innovation was the ability for the user to take this “interactive banner ad” and put it wherever they chose. In other words, not just anywhere on the page the advertiser chose, but rather on any page that the user controlled. In effect, this is what we now call widgets.

Why was user control over placement of the advertiser-created content so critical? Because at the moment that advertisers started relying on users to place the ads on their own web pages, they had to make those ad units actually useful. And this is the moment of conception for what we expect to be an eventual avalanche of advertiser-created/sponsored useful “content” on the web.

We believe that the evolution of brand advertising continues at breakneck speed. It’s true that the widget is an evolution of the banner ad (once you’ve added interactivity and the ability for users to place them in convenient locations). But what is the destination of this journey? Widgets are mini-applications that users embed in the web page of their choice. Their constrained screen real estate makes them ideal for embedding. That said, brand marketers who are deploying widgets successfully are already realizing that those same constraints that make widgets consumable also limit the amount of engagement they can generate with an audience. Why not create entire useful web applications that engage audiences exponentially relative to their widget siblings? In fact, these new web apps can have their own fleet of widgets that bring new users back to the “mother ship”.

Once marketers understand that this new generation of advertising is not just banner ads made large (and larger) but has a fundamentally different contract with the audience, both marketers and the general public will start to truly get the benefits of this new advertising medium.