Today Google officially launched gadget ads. As I sat through the What’s New with AdSense Webinar I remembered them talking about this but hadn’t really seen many test examples. Basically with this new ad format it takes your typical banner and turns it into a miniature version of your site if you choose. You have the ablility to incorporate feeds into ads which I think is really cool. The first things that pops into my head is Real Estate ads. Our newspapers had tons of classifieds listings so why not build out an ad that pulls our Real Estate classifieds through an ad where people can search without even having to click through to a landing page. Google is also allowing you to incorporate:

• maps
• images
• audio
• video
• flash
• html
• javascript

With these ads people have the ability to even purchase items from a store within the gadget ad itself. I’m really excited to see the progression of these ad formats and watch what people are able to invent using the Google API. The gadgets can be contextually targetted or site targeted. You can see examples of Google Gadget Ads by visiting their gallery. These gadget ads if done right can be very usefull and hopefully fill the void that banners (or display ads) have left us with for years now. If effective ads can be built that add valuable information to a site then I would be a supporter of these ads running on any site that I controlled.