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.

How is this a widget? It's not a desktop app. This is just a branded application (or rich media app)

Posted by: Matt Voerman at December 9, 2008 11:30 PM

>>> 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".

Posted by: Laurent at December 10, 2008 10:01 AM

seems like a branded application to me and not a widget

Posted by: Victoria at December 12, 2008 06:12 AM