Branded-Ware - Latest Promotional Items

What’s better than a pen, faster than a thank-you card, more immediate than a wall calendar, and more visible than a baseball hat? Branded-ware - the latest wave in promotional giveaway items, and it’s entirely digital.

The basic idea is simple, and an increasing number of small Internet firms are taking to it.

First, you write or find a freely distributed program — something small and useful or fun, like a calendar, screen saver or calculator. Then you embed your company name and give it away to customers. Tell them to give it away too. Every time someone uses it, your company name and logo pop up on the screen.

After branding, or having someone else brand your program, you’re free to hand out as many royalty-free copies as you want.

One company doing branded-ware — and it may have been the first — is named InternetPerks, which calls its products IncentiveWare. It provides small programs (or "droplets") bearing your logo. The firm considers its IncentiveWare a way for companies to say "thanks" to people who visit their sites on the World Wide Web, as well as keeping their names, products and Web sites in the user’s mind.

IncentivePerks offers several small programs to choose from, including a calendar, memory joggers, calculation tools and the like.

A similar product is Print Screen by JE Software. According to spokesperson Joel Hudesman: "Print screen resides on your system and will print whatever you see on your printer. This is a useful tool when your system is crashing and you have an error message you want to save but don’t have time to copy the message. You tell us what you want your customers to see when the program pops up and prints, and we’ll embed it on a copy of our Print Screen version 2.0."

A similar idea comes from Parable. The firm’s "Things" are Web-based multimedia, action-oriented buttons that link viewers to your Web site from other sites. "Thing" designs can be freely distributed, and if you put a lock on your art work, it can be shared but not altered.

A final item called Liver Dance, a screen-saver from Rhode Island Soft Systems features a chorus line of dancing livers, decked out with tuxes and batons. They do a step-dance routine to an original Celtic music score commissioned by RISS for this program. But in this case, the ads are pre-sold. Hasbro Interactive, Prodigy, Barnes & Noble, Symantec and WinZip take turns displaying their logos at the end of the comic musical number.

IncentivePerks has a Web site at http://www.internetperks.com. The JE Software Web site is at http://www. jesoft.com. Trial versions of Parable’s ThingMaker with publishing crippled are available at http://www.geocities. com , at http://www.parablecorp.com and at http://www.tripod.com. The RISS Web site is at http://www.risoftsystems.com.

(Contacts: Julie Mousel, InternetPerks, 847-291-1616 x276; Joel Hudesman, JE Software, 914-699-6710; Phil Hall, OpenCity Communication, 212-714-3575)