Thursday, May 03, 2007

OnHollywood: Avatars Give Content Life

I've never been much of a believer in virtual worlds or avatars as revenue generating or business tools, but SecondLife and Oddcast are doing their best to persuade me. Adi Sideman, CEO of Oddcast, told me about how stickiness and return visits can skyrocket when websites from customer service to sales to personal websites include avatars and human voices.

Interactivity certainly gets your attention, and Oddcast has been working with publishers including ESPN and Comedy Central to enliven their content with avatars. The company licenses the technology to corporation and gives away avatars to individuals to embed in their websites. Oddcast generates revenu by putting branded wrappers around or behind the avatars. Avatars can promo products or be included in emails.

Sideman says avatars add personalized expression while allowing the individual to not include pictures of themselves, since not everyone is comfortable with digital cameras. We can expect to see avatars showing up on MySpace and at retailers. Like it or not, onced they start becoming commonplace, publishers will have to consider adding avatars or risk having their sites seem static by comparison

Posted By John Gartner at 12:00 PM
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