Firetop

When I was in uptown New York last month meeting with the folks at Doubleclick my attention was drawn to the ‘talking avatars’ gaining in popularity over in the US. It’s always difficult to create that ‘personal’ feel on a website consisting of just words and pictures, now with the assistance of the folks at ‘Oddcast’, you can feature your very own animated character to put your visitors at ease and audibly deliver your message.

To me this is great, it’s somehow less intrusive than a real life video replay and much easier to warm to. A whole array of characters from the anonymously generated to more famous animated Ghandis and Albert Einsteins can be programmed to deliver your chat at any time of the day. Want to change the message regularly? No problem, just record it over the phone and ‘hey presto’ updated message (or so I’m told). From the reported interaction rates this is definitely something I want to have nailed by 2007, either in a banner format or as part of a static website location.

Another company engaging in on-screen video animation is Rovion. The difference here is that the characters are real life human presenters who stroll onto the bottom of your screen or appear mid-product browse and say ‘hey - I’m Joe blogs and this is my book, please buy it - just click on me’ (or words to that effect). Now this one is arguably more intrusive, but again, inside a rich media banner with the audio preset to MUTE (to reduce user irritation) this might work out too.

Over the coming months I’ll let you know whetherit’s real or virtual that gets the thumbs up / down.

Oddcast Avatars
Rovion InPerson
(Visit these sites with sound ON)

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