Clearspring To Serve Widgets As Ads
New Ad Format Extends Advertisers' Relationship with its Audience
New York, NY. - Nov. 7, 2007 — Clearspring Technologies, the market leader in widget syndication and tracking, today announced the launch of Clearspring for Advertisers, a new service that delivers widgets as online ads. The new ad-served format enables marketers to replace standard-sized online banner ads with interactive, portable widgets.
Unlike banner ads, widgets are shareable Web applications or components that consumers can easily grab and post to their social networking site, personal start page or blog of their choice. Posted widgets retain their viral capability and can be shared time and again. This allows for the advertiser's message to spread across the Web, creates a direct channel for marketers to engage in continuous conversations with their audience and lets end users establish themselves as advocates for their favorite products, movies, TV shows and brands. Sony Pictures Entertainment, The CW Television Network, Comedy Central, DreamWorks Animation, and Warner Bros. have all recently used Clearspring for Advertisers.
Sony Pictures Entertainment was Clearspring's first partner to use ad widgets for two movie releases this year - Superbad and Resident Evil: Extinction. "By using ad widgets instead of standard-sized banners, we were able to extend our time with the consumer and their network of friends, as they made our ad widget part of their personal pages," said Dwight Caines, executive vice president, Worldwide Digital Marketing, Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The CW Television Network, also used Clearspring for Advertisers to launch an ad-widget campaign this year to build buzz among teens about the fall season premier of the Gossip Girl TV series. The day before the show premiered, thousands of fans had posted the Gossip Girl widget on their personal pages. These fans continue to promote Gossip Girl to their friends. The CW's use of ad widgets instead of standard-sized banners on sites such as People.com and MySpace, generated more than 65 million widget views during the campaign launch period, and continues to receive impressions.
Clearspring for Advertisers is fully integrated with the top ad-serving systems including DoubleClick and Mediaplex. Clearspring also offers a full set of analytics and reporting tools so advertisers can monitor activity as ad widgets traverse the Web and repurpose media placements in response to each widget's viral performance.
Clearspring publishes widgets that can be shared on multiple social networking sites, start pages and blogs like Friendster, TypePad, Blogger, iGoogle, Windows Live, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Webwag, and Freewebs, as well as on Facebook and MySpace. Clearspring provides advertisers the ability to convert ad widgets into fully compatible Facebook applications.
According to Hooman Radfar, founder and chief executive officer of Clearspring, "With Clearspring for Advertisers, everybody wins. Marketers can make one media buy and have the potential to increase impressions and get more bang for their media buck. Creative directors and producers unleash their ideas on a new platform for innovation, and the advertiser sustains a dialogue with the end user, who becomes an advocate for the brand."
Built for mission-critical campaigns, Clearspring's widget distribution service is used by the world's largest media companies and brand advertisers, including NBC Universal, Time Warner and the NBA. Clearspring for Advertisers is a scalable, reliable and fault- tolerant service, with its servers geographically distributed to support the world's most successful campaigns. For more information go to http://www.clearspring.com/advertising
About Clearspring
Clearspring Technologies is the leader in connecting publishers, services and advertisers to audiences on the social web. Ranked #1 by comScore, Clearspring’s AddThis platform enables leading publishers like AOL, Demand Media, MySpace, and NBC to distribute and track digital content such as web pages, widgets, and videos to social networks, bookmarking sites, blogs, and more. AddThis is used by over 1.5 million unique domains reaching over 1 billion unique users monthly. Clearspring's Audience Platform leverages aggregate data from AddThis to allow advertisers and publishers to reach these audiences by influence, interest and intent in real-time. Founded in 2004, the company is privately held. Visit www.clearspring.com.