Victoria’s Secret widget
To promote its website on its last and highly longed-for fashion show, Victoria’s Secret put a massive and rich widget forward.
Loyal to the site it represents (fully developped in flash, with tons of materials), it offers a lot of content with videos, pictures and news feed.
I am convinced widgets could be a very good opportunity for brands, but they are too often used as shallow gadgets, with no marketing purpose, or just as an excuse to show your brand is up-to-date …
Even if this one from Victoria’s Secret offers nothing innovative, it is well designed, and it can rely on the aspirational strength of the brand.
Above all, this widget is relevant as Victoria’s Secret is a brand that can rely on fans who would definitely like to be associated with it. So, by offering all this premium content, it gives the brand a good chance to be put on many blogs and social networks. In this case the statutory aspect is key.
But as usual you will still and always need to initiate the spread by making it known in the first place …
How is this a widget? It’s not a desktop app. This is just a branded application (or rich media app)
>>> Matt
You are right. Originally, and by definition, widgets were applets on desktops and more recently mobile phones. In this case, gadget might have probably been more accurate. But it is now common to call this kind of branded applications web widgets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_widget .
The human nature being prone to always get the shortest way, most of the people, and especially brands, now simply (and wrongly ?) call them widgets. And actually this is how it is mentionned on the Victoria’s Secret website, just as Nike also recently did with its football “widget”.
seems like a branded application to me and not a widget