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The Nearly Personal Touch
ESPN has an avatar program called "Voice of the Fan" that allows fans to record their brief analyses and rants and choose an avatar to repeat them. Because it is co-sponsored by Wendy's, you can give your avatar the option of holding one of the chain's trademark square burgers and standing before a backdrop of flying burgers.
There is a downside to customer-created content: The advertiser loses control of the message.
  Frank Ahrens and Frank Ahrens 2.0. |
"We don't want anyone sending inappropriate messages on someone's branded content," Sideman said. "It's a risk you take when you do user-generated advertising."
Oddcast will delete avatars that go astray or that users have programmed to say things unflattering about the product, Sideman said.
It takes time to get used to an avatar version of a real person. It might be the blinking and the way their eyes follow the mouse arrow that can be unsettling.
One of the first widely seen avatars was Ananova, the turquoise-haired news anchor -- or VHost -- for British telecommunications giant Orange SA with a voice that sounds like an electronic Emma Thompson.
But her voice is an improvement over the early avatars' balky voice-assembly technology, the verbal equivalent of a ransom note pieced together with words cut from a magazine, or the sound of Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer.
Since its 1999 launch, Oddcast has improved the detail of their avatars -- the newer ESPN avatars are better-rendered than the older ones created for CBS Sportsline. But they are still nowhere near the quality of animé or the style of vérit é animation in such movies as "A Scanner Darkly."
Sideman says he must design avatars simple enough to be viewed on almost all Web browsers.
DaimlerChrysler's Dr. Z, created by Detroit's Organic Inc., is not as sophisticated as the Oddcast avatars. He does not speak, but instead communicates via text balloons. He taps his foot impatiently while waiting for users to ask a question.
And even though he greets readers with "Guten tag," the mute avatar does not translate Zetsche's powerful Germanness that the company has made an integral part of its new TV campaign.
"We thought we didn't want to overpower the Web site with a lot of speaking," DaimlerChrysler's MacKenzie said. "Also, speaking takes longer than reading the bullet points. [Text balloons are] a way to get the message across quickly."
Readers can ask the Dr. Z avatar a question via e-mail. Most of the questions are product-centric, and many are -- to put it delicately -- loaded. Such as: "What makes the Dodge Sprinter Van so great?"
We wrote: "Dear Dr. Z: By re-emphasizing your company's German roots -- and, indeed, by placing a German front and center of your ad campaign -- are you attempting to subtly, or not-so-subtly, distance your company from the Troubled Big Two here in the States, GM and Ford?"
Two days later, by e-mail, Dr. Z replied. Or, rather, he didn't.
A member of "Dr. Z's Customer Action Team," sent a form e-mail that did not address the question. MacKenzie said such a stock reply "should not have happened" and the situation would be looked into. Call-center employees answer Dr. Z's e-mail, MacKenzie said.
To his credit, the employee e-mailed back in an attempt to answer the question. The second reply was longer but no better. Maybe the question was too far afield.
Or maybe the call center needs an avatar.
