Our custom browser experiences prove valuable because they are engaging. The browser is the most used application on the computer. You wrap that in branding, images, content and functionality and you’ve got a pretty compelling product. You put that in the hands of your loyal audience and you’ve got a powerful engagement tool that’s going to strengthen that connection with the end user.

I don’t see engagement as the problem. For advertisers, though, I can see the problem being where the engagement label is applied. If your user is engaged with a web site, the ads only chance is to interrupt that experience which probably isn’t going to get the response you want (though there are billions of dancing mortgage ads that will argue this point with me).

When engagement is within the site, if you’re not a natural part of the site, your value declines. AOL Instant Messenger never really cracked the ad mystery because the high volume of ads and a user’s intense focus on the application. Engagement with the product is through the roof, but with the ads is horrendous. Brand marketers found their integration points however with avatars and skins and you saw users respond.

To claim engagement isn’t valuable to the advertiser or is overhyped, to me, misses the mark. An advertisers interaction with its end user is incredibly valuable, and that’s engagement. Just don’t expect it when their attention is firmly somewhere else.

Over the past week, three articles from AdAge, Adweek and MediaPost have provided their take on the current state of widgets and Facebook applications. I’m inserting myself into the discussion because there’s commonality with widgets, apps and Brand Thunder’s branded browsers – engagement. The articles follow, and not all are kind:

Widgets Are Made for Marketing, So Why Aren’t More Advertisers Using Them?
Apps: The Newest Brand Graveyard
Of Widgets, Apps And Social Advertising

When these products get criticized, it seems to be on quantity of downloads and users. You get the feeling that the measures of success are the old reach and frequency metrics of broadcast. Expectations for millions of users for a single product should be lowered. Tens or hundreds of thousands, however, is achievable and can pay dividends.

By the time a user has invited one of our branded browsers into their life, we’ve worked hard to make sure they find it interesting, compelling and adding value or we know we’ll be asked to leave. If we’ve done our job, our branded browser gets to engage that user for weeks, months or years. Pretty phenomenal communications channel, and you’ll find widgets and apps can offer the same engagement value.

Are we splashing a message to millions of people? Probably not. But, we connect with a sizable audience for really large amounts of time. If you use that time wisely, you can come away with a very committed customer.