Liza Hausman heads up marketing for widget platform and ad network Gigya. Ms. Hausman has held positions in traditional brand advertising at FCB, retail marketing consulting at Booz Allen Hamilton and online marketing at direct-response advertisers QuinStreet Inc. She earned her BA in rhetoric from University of California, Berkeley and her MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.
eMarketer spoke with Ms. Hausman about how advertisers use widgets and the future of the applications on social networks.
eMarketer: For those who aren’t
familiar with Gigya, what does it do?
Liza Hausman: We have a platform
for sharing widgets and tracking their use. It makes it easy to grab a piece of
content and put it on your social network profile page, blog, Webpage or
desktop.
The product initially appealed to widget
developers, social networking sites and other content developers. JibJab is a
good example of the type of company that wanted to make it easy for people who
found their site to grab content and not have to figure out where to paste code
on a Webpage.
eMarketer: How does it work?
Ms. Hausman: Clients use our platform to make their widgets easier to share and track.
They can also become a publisher in our distribution network.
When Internet users install a widget that uses our
platform, they can customize their widget or find
something they want to post on their social network profile. We also ask if
they would also like a widget from another advertiser in our network.
We guarantee advertisers will get a meaningful
number of installs for their widgets—hundreds of thousands in a span of
several weeks. We charge anywhere from $0.50 to $2 depending on how successful
the widget is and other factors.
This solves a couple of problems for advertisers.
One, you don’t know if a widget will have a large number of installs until you
release it. Second, even if it does go viral, it’s an exponential growth curve.
The larger the starting base, the greater the growth. Most advertisers are not
willing to wait two years for a widget to become a hit.
eMarketer: What are some of the
most innovative widget uses you’ve seen?
Ms. Hausman: Unilever is a good
one. They came out with a new line of
Dove products called “go fresh.”
They invested their money creating a whole
microseries with Alicia Keys, which ran during “The Hills.” They had us create
and distribute a widget with the same series in it, so that if “Hills” viewers
missed part of the microseries, wanted to see it again or share it with a
friend, they could.
It was a matter of sharing and building some other
elements into the widget. So they had a chat room. We distributed the widget
upfront and each week we could publish a new video into it, which you couldn’t
do if you were just sharing an individual video through YouTube. So we actually
put calls to action that said, “Just updated: Video three is here.” They could also have had an exclusive
episode in there.
eMarketer: How do you think
publishers’ and advertisers’ use of widgets will develop in the next few years?
Ms. Hausman: I think you’ll see
greater adoption and creativity, experimentation and measurement.
In the not-too-distant future, widgets will be able
to tap into your friends on social networks in the same way that Facebook
applications do now.
We also believe aggregators will continue to play
an important role because standards are not anywhere on the horizon. Even
though social networks are opening their software to outside developers, there
are no incentives to use a single standard that would work across all social
networks.
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