Widget Ads - future of marketing & advertising?

from Mediapost.com -- Marketers would love to live to see the day when consumers proudly wear brands like badges on their social-networking profile pages. Widgets, those little embeddable software programs you see all over sites like Facebook, provide a means to do that (sort of). The great thing about widgets is that distribution is totally viral (i.e. free) and consumers decide to put them on their own pages. So, if your brand is cool enough or your product desirable enough, then consumers will want to show their friends.

For example, Toyota recently launched a new campaign for its Scion line of vehicles in which rich media banner ads doubled as uploadable widgets. Adrian Si, an interactive marketing manager for Scion, believes the widgets could achieve the same 1 to 2 percent click-through rate as the rich media banners. That would translate to a 4 percent to 5 percent engagement rate. To measure the campaign, Scion will monitor both click-throughs and the number of times the widget is installed on someone's site. "This could be more valuable [than banner ads]," says Si.

Read more at gigaom.com