Google Gadget Ads just launched today - heard about it from John Battelle. According to the AdWords Help Center, Google Gadget Ads is available to a small number of AdWords accounts:

"…..You may not be able to create gadget ads in your own AdWords account just yet. Gadget ads require a high level of technical resources to create, and generally also require a high level of support from the AdWords support team. To avoid confusion for users, and to make sure we have appropriate levels of support, gadget ads are currently enabled for a limited number of AdWords advertisers who have created content-rich ads in the past."

John Battelle quotes a Google Press Release that has more details on Google Gadget Ads, including this spicy bit of information:

"…Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds , images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both."

I think people generally respond better to visual information than written and click through studies often show that a picture link is clicked on 4 times more often than a textual link. However, there needs to be some limitations on rich media ads, so we don't get to see so many of them packed into a web page, that the ads become "noisy".

I'm not sure where the ads will be show, but if it were on the search results page of Google and everyone used Google Gadget Ads, it might present too much information to process well, visually.

On the other hand, the Google Gadget Ads would do, I predict, much better than a textual ad being placed next to it .. and once Google Gadget Ads starts being used, most advertisers will be forced to use it too…making a lot of "eye candy" and ultimately, a headache.