Good article in New Media Age (27 May 04) on avatars and chatbots. A few choice items:
- "There's hard evidence that avatars on a site can improve its impact on consumers, and can encourage people to give information about themselves that can be used for marketing."
- "[avatars]..manage to combine a fun element with serious branding intent"
- "financial services companies are...seeing the virtual characters as a way of guiding customers through information about complex products"
- "the use of avatars on Dell's site found that users who interacted with them were twice as likely to giver personal information than those who didn't"
- "online campaign featuring avatars for V Graham Norton and Celebrity Big Brother.... generated click-through rates of 30%"
- "when avatars are used for e-learning content, use of the online courses increases by 400%"
The article also talks about the problems with downloading some avatars on to desktops. Because our chatbots are web based and only use Flash on the client we have never had any problems using them through corporate firewalls.
