Clearspring Introduces ConnectedAds - Viral Widgets That Leverage Social Connections
Advertising messages more relevant for target audiences on social networks
McLean, Va. & SAN FRANCISCO - April 21, 2009 — Clearspring Technologies, the leading widget network connecting publishers and audiences on the distributed Web, today announced ConnectedAds, a new service that lets advertisers use Facebook in a more targeted way by tapping into information about the public connections between people on the social networking site. In addition to better targeting, ConnectedAds also provides a more engaging and relevant experience for users. The service uses the same industry-leading sharing and tracking as other Clearspring widgets, making it significantly easier to instigate and measure word-of-mouth campaigns.
With ConnectedAds, advertisers can measure the entire conversation around the widget including comments, news feeds, shares, notifications, fan page links and other interactions. In the past, the only metrics for widgets on social networking sites were installs and views. For example, if people install movie trailer widgets on their Facebook pages, the movie studio can now measure if that application appeared on a person's newsfeed and count subsequent friend comments that it generated. They can also measure if it was shared with followers on Twitter or added to their Delicious bookmarks.
"Today, widgets can be distributed broadly across the social Web, while also providing deep accountability via metrics", Hooman Radfar, co-founder and chief executive officer of Clearspring stated. "We are moving to the next phase of the evolution of advertising in widgets — enabling them to more deeply integrate with the environment they are installed in. The holy grail for advertisers is to measure and predict word-of-mouth advertising across this emerging social landscape. ConnectedAds are going to accelerate the realization of that vision."
Social sites are opening their messaging and social information at an accelerating pace — Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and MySpace ID are all examples of open initiatives. Every day there are more channels for advertisers to use to engage their advocates and customers. The expanding social network opportunities make it difficult for advertisers to reach their audience in the constantly changing social landscape. Clearspring provides a turn-key solution for advertisers to leverage these channels by creating, distributing, and tracking Connected Ads.
Clearspring's one-click widget sharing and tracking platform, which forms the basis of ConnectedAds, has empowered the largest publishers (NBC Universal, Time Warner, MTV Networks) and advertisers (Clearasil, Sprint) to virally distribute widgets across the social Web at a massive scale. Coupled with Clearsping's pay-for-performance widget distribution network, this solution has become a standard means to reach social media audiences.
As part of the ConnectedAds program, Clearspring will be extending its ABCi certified widget metrics suite to capture social interactions. For advertisers, measuring virality is growing beyond the need to know about installs and views. ConnectedAds can be spread across 80+ social destinations and leverage social information from Facebook and MySpace platforms. Clearspring plans to support additional services in the coming months.
Clearspring is a one-stop shop for advertisers — the company develops widgets and takes ownership of placement. This is important for advertisers that don't have the expertise or time to work with many different vendors on a very large campaign, such as a movie studio launching a large summer blockbuster.
For more information, visit http://www.clearspring.com/connectyourads.
About Clearspring
Clearspring is the leader in social distribution, connecting publishers and advertisers to audiences on the social Web. Clearspring's content sharing products, ranked No. 1 by comScore, enable publishers, developers and advertisers to easily distribute and track digital content such as widgets, videos, photos and links to the most popular destinations, including social networks, start pages, bookmarking sites, blogs, mobile devices and desktop platforms. The company provides additional distribution of content on a paid performance basis to the world's leading brands through a targeted social distribution network of affiliate partners. The company reaches over 534 millionusers worldwide. Its tools are served billions of times monthly and they power programs for many major brands and over 400,000 other long-tail developers. To learn more, visit www.clearspring.com.