By Frank Ahrens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 15, 2006; D01
For the Internet bleeding-edgers, avatars are de rigueur. Users create an animated online version of themselves that either mirrors their real-life appearance or transforms them into a beautiful, idealized online version of themselves, ready to talk with friends, shop and communicate with other avatars.
Now, advertisers and marketers -- who have been experimenting with ways to reach consumers beyond television commercials, newspaper ads or billboards -- are turning to avatars with increased fervor. As company pitchmen, avatars spread the marketing message in an ever-more viral and insidious way by using friendships to hawk products.
Companies such as Accuweather Inc., L'Oreal Co. and Global Gillette are avatar-equipped. Even auto giant DaimlerChrysler AG has drawn a low-tech avatar of its chief executive, Dieter Zetsche, to answer online questions as "Dr. Z."
The real-life Zetsche is starring in a television commercial campaign that plays up the German engineering of the company -- possibly as a way for the company to distance itself from the troubled American auto industry. But it's his avatar that's in the spotlight on the Web site, interacting with consumers wanting to learn more about the cars.
"We wanted to do something with Dieter, but also we were aware we couldn't have Dieter working the site and answering questions personally, so we felt the avatar was a wonderful way to translate Dieter's relationship with the customer," said Christine MacKenzie, executive director of multi-brand marketing and agency relations for DaimlerChrysler. "Also, it's something that young Web users are very familiar with."
Next week, the acid-reflux drug Nexium is expected to launch a campaign that lets users create their own avatar, record a greeting for the avatar to repeat and send a "Purple Pill postcard" e-mail to friends detailing "healthy-living" activities in vacation spots such as the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
Research by New York-based Oddcast Inc., which created the Nexium avatar, shows that if a straight-ahead e-mail pitch from any company shows up in consumers' inboxes, it has about a 15 percent chance of being opened.
But the consumer-created avatars sent to friends -- that carry a product pitch with them -- get opened about 70 percent of the time. Additionally, about 30 percent of those who receive such avatars from friends create and send their own, passing along the advertiser's name, product and slogan like a virus.
So, basically, such avatars are exploiting the trust of a person receiving an e-mail from a friend?
"That's exactly right," said Oddcast's chief executive, Adi Sideman. Oddcast has about 200 major clients, including AstraZenica PLC (Nexium), McDonald's Corp., ESPN, CBS Sportsline and CareerBuilder.com, and has licensed its software to more than 5,000 others, he said. Other avatar designers include Organic Inc., Comverse Technology Inc., Meez.com and Imvu.com.
Oddcast launched a pass-along avatar for CareerBuilder, an online job Web site, five months ago. Starring the monkeys from the CareerBuilder television commercials, users can choose a monkey avatar, dress him and have him speak a short message that the user creates by typing text or dialing a phone number and recording it.
The monkeys have made 44 million hops -- from one computer to another -- around the world since they came online, Sideman said. Prominently displayed on each monk-e-mail is the tagline, "Brought to you by CareerBuilder.com."
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.
"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.
