With eyes that follow your pointer and a constant (not to mention unsettling) Bauble Head-like nod, the new SitePal talking advertisements that are popping up all over the Internet are just plain creepy—like Ally McBeal dancing baby creepy. Despite the video sales pitch, which assures that the "virtual hosts" boost online sales, I am compelled to click the other way for fear of having SitePal nightmares.
1 comment:
Hi Sara - My name is Shawn Holt, and I manage the SitePal business for Oddcast.
You didn't like the ditzy bobbling head? Well, you caught us - for a handful of accounts, in some browsers , Angelas head could drift from side to side. We rectified the problem last week.
As for our avatars in general, I and lot's of people, liked the Ally McBeal dancing baby, but that's beside the point :).
SitePal.com has about 10,000 paying customers, who find custom characters, can greet, inform and persuade prospects to take action. Several studies, including the American Marketing Association Journal, have empirical evidence that these SitePal characters improve satisfaction.
Now you are definitely right - there can be crappy characters out there. We give customers an almost limitless ability to customize them with accessories, color, shading, even age - but alas, a tool like that can occasionally be a dangerous thing. Sometimes, people put a lousy audio or text to speech message, sometimes, they use ugly colors, or even pick the wrong character on a scene. We believe that the ability to customize a character, exactly the way you want to be represented, is more important than preventing people from doing foolish things.
Our showcase at http://www.sitepal.com/showcase.php has almost 100 examples of how customers are using our product.
I hear you, Avatars may not meet everyone's taste, but done properly, our customers constantly tell us that a speaking character can be a great addition to a website.
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