Last week, Buddy Media launched the BuddyBrain. We are thrilled about the excitement generated by this product and its ability to provide accountable metrics that support the strength and engagement value of branded applications or app-vertisements. We strongly believe that the BuddyBrain helps make social marketing accessible, accountable, and results-driven.

Caroline McCarthy, who covers social media for CNET and has probably seen hundreds, if not thousands, of social marketing technology platforms, broke the story. She nailed what we’re trying to do when she wrote in her The Social column that the BuddyBrain was tackling “one of the challenges of social advertising: that it’s just plain difficult to tell how successful it is.”

We built BuddyBrain to make available to our clients data that we already knew but were providing manually.

I think the findings speak for themselves. In particular, users spent an average of 2 minutes and 35 seconds engaged with our branded applications,or 75 times greater than the time consumers  spend interacting with traditional banner ads and five times greater than the time spent watching a typical TV commercial. And 85% of our users returned for multiple interactions with our app-vertisements, with 56% of the total user base returning 9 times or more during the month of testing.

Another general finding from the BuddyBrain data is that our branded applications are entertaining, fun, and engaging ads. Better yet, they encourage users to become social brand advocates who evangelize the application, passing it around to their own personal networks. They are a better form of advertising than other ways to market in the digital and social media world. In the end, the apps are ads, albeit a new form of digital ads, that are tied to the social graph and a database.

In short, App-vertising programs are branded experiences that connect brands to people in a fundamentally better way than banners, buttons, and other interruption-marketing techniques. Our clients understand this, which has lead to more than 6 campaigns for our largest clients, repeat business from more the a dozen clients already and significant commitments for 2009.

Many of our clients and potential clients agree with our conclusion that these numbers are game-changing for brands. As Matt Rebeiro of Ryan*MacMillan, a digital marketing agency in London with large clients that include BBC Worldwide, Discovery Channel, TimeLife and others, noted on the company’s blog, Buddy Media’s “figures look like a pretty good reason to ditch banner ads…and instead offer audiences a chance to interact with digital advertising so both parties get something positive out of the interaction.”

Despite technology like the BuddyBrain that provides transparency to clients and our ongoing efforts to educate brand marketers and their agencies, some confusion remains in the marketplace about what branded apps are and why they are successful.

One of the most compelling data points that I took out of the BuddyBrain was the clear differentiation between branded apps and top apps like Slide’s Top Friends application, Rock You’s Super Wall application and games like Texas Hold ‘Em from Zynga and Entourage or (fluff)friends from Social Gaming Network. Our apps are built for different purposes and the data proves out that we are very successful in building social brand awareness. Comparing the top applications to branded applications is like comparing the TV show Lost to the 30-second commercials that run during the show. Yes, they both run on the same ‘platform,’ ABC. But Lost has a star-studded cast, significant network promotion and a new, fresh episode every week, with some episodes costing up to $14 million each. Lost is an entertainment juggernaut. The commercial is, well, a commercial.

The applications we build for our clients are marketing programs. The applications built by the top Facebook and MySpace developers are uber-funded entertainment properties that are continually cared for, improved, tweaked and refreshed with new content and features. This takes significant resources and talent. The top 4 application companies alone have raised more than $150 million total. That’s a ton of money to build applications. I only imagine what we could do for a client if they gave us $150 million. Each of the app-vertising programs Buddy Media builds have cost much less!

As social media sites continue to grow in popularity, so will their share of the world’s media budgets. And branded applications will occupy an important part of the smart brand marketer’s tool kit. They won’t be the only tool and will often support a larger program on the platforms. For clients that need massive reach, a banner campaign on MySpace or Facebook will usually make the most sense.

The opening of the social media sites to third-party developers provide brand marketers unprecedented access to engaged consumers. More and more brands, like Anheuser-Busch, FedEx, New Balance and Priceline, want to work with Buddy Media to engage users and increase their social brand loyalty. And the BuddyBrain is helping us show the world that one of the single best ways to engage users is to build compelling app-vertising programs.