Monday, July 6, 2009

Desktop Widgets - An On-Demand Medium Unto Itself?

A friend of mine and graphic designer, Marshall Gisser, is the owner of NYDesign, a successful graphic design firm located in Cedarhurst, NY. I recently caught up with him via LinkedIn as he is looking for Partners to help market and sell his Desktop Widgets product.

In a nutshell, Desktop Widgets are small, fully branded desktop applications that are downloaded from a website or received via email, and install themselves in a few seconds. DesktopWidgets function independent of any browser. When inactive, they reside on the desktop as small icons. But when clicked, or when you launch them remotely with the Admin Console, the widget expands with custom animations to any size and shape, displaying multimedia content that can be updated 24/7, at your convenience.

I was trying to figure out if these Desktop Widgets are an on-demand marketing medium unto themselves or should we consider them an "upgrade" to a corporate web site as part of the overall marketing mix. My conclusion is the former; they are definitely stand alone marketing mediums due to their flexibility to integrate other marketing technologies such as FLASH, online promotions and video clips right into the "heart" of the widget. No browser is needed and the "mix" updates can be pushed to every Desktop Widget that a particular brand manager might have created with one push from the Admin Widget. Check out the Desktop Widget demo by clicking here.