As our own Dean Donaldson recently wrote, “Word-of-mouth is both powerful and most often, free…. From within an online advert people can now become advocates who ‘wear the brands tee-shirt’ and in turn convincing their friends to join suit.”

Following is an excerpt from an article, which originally appeared in The ClickZ Network, Jun 30, 2008 by Fred Aun,  describing the Nike widget campaign, one of the most innovative widget ads we’ve seen thus far.

“Mike Cookson, Nike’s content and media director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is quick to acknowledge his company doesn’t exactly have a tough time when it comes to marketing. A brand like Nike, he concedes, is already a household name.

“At Nike, we are fortunate,” he said. “We are in a high interest category and we have a lot of heritage, over the last 25 years, telling great stories in fantastic ways. When it comes to our access to commercial channels, we’re lucky as well.”

Nevertheless, Cookson said a recently launched, video widget-based campaign for Nike football [as in soccer] is a sign that the company isn’t resting on its traditional ad laurels.

“Youth audiences consume and edit media in ways that a lot of people who have been in the business a long time have a hard time relating to,” said Cookson. “These young people grew up in a world where the Internet and mobile phones have always been there. The way the young consumer operates is very different to previous generations.”

The campaign, created by AKQA, distributed by Mindshare and using widget technology from Eyeblaster, is supposedly the largest global video widget campaign ever attempted….

Click here to read the full article.