William Rice is president of the Web Marketing association.
He has used both Rovion’s inperson and Oddcast’s
Sitepal with very positive results. What follows are some of
Rice’s thoughts on each and how a human touch has helped
the Web Marketing association.
Rice and the Web Marketing association are currently using
Rovion on their website. They have found it particularly
useful and a nice match to the site.
“From a website design perspective, we really like Rovion
because of the quality of video,” said Rice. “You come to
our site and you really get something integrated into the
look and feel of our site. it’s very easy and extremely helpful.
We think Rovion gives us a very upscale look and
feel.”
But the Web Marketing association’s first experience with
a talking character was with Sitepal – a Web Marketing
award winner in 2004 for Outstanding achievement in
Website Development.
“When we used Sitepal, it was brand-new,” said Rice.
“The animation was very interesting. What i liked about
Sitepal, the technology lets you simply create an audio file.
You record your voice and animation lip syncs to it – which
allows you to make changes on the fly much faster.
“We used different messages with different call-to-actions
for the 2005 Web awards. We would create an audio file,
upload to the Sitepal console and literally, within an hour
we would have a new message on the site.”
Both inperson and Sitepal did come with some apprehension,
however. Rice was worried about overwhelming visitors.
“From our experience with both, it’s important to limit
the amount of time people will see the characters, especially
in the case of repeat visitors,” said Rice. “it’s a great
attention getter but you don’t want to overdo it.”
Complaints started coming in. But, once a cookie was enabled
from Rovion to limit the frequency of the message,
all of the complaints stopped.
Rice and the Web Marketing association used Rovion’s
provided talent for their campaign. They discussed what
they were looking for, then Rovion’s producers offered
choices, shot videos and presented them for approval. all
of the work was done remotely.
Rice said that Sitepal was a much more do-it-yourself system
but claimed working with both companies was, “very,
very easy.”