CopyDiva

Last night’s BMA Colorado meeting featured Adi Sideman from Oddcast was a big hit with the business-to-business marketing crowd. Certainly, the attraction was the cool factor being used in consumer marketing such as Cheerioke, the Cheerios karaoke machine and Careerbuilder’s Monkey Mail. But Adi also spoke about the applications that are more B2B in nature — using an avatar for virtual sales training of a wide spread and hard to bring together sales force. Just think, make avatars of all those execs that need to be a part of the sales training, then just re-record the audio as needed and let it go live. You can save a lot on video production costs, because there are no video production costs.

Other applications: apparently, some firms are using them in e-learning tools, where they are more effective than those without.

How can B2B jump on board with talking ad units? Its clearly much cheaper to set up an avatar on a banner ad, and hope that people pass it on, then it is to buy standard media ad units. Even if its a failure, the test costs a whole lot less than traditional media. Do you think the trade journals will jump on board with talking ad units?

Then of course, there’s the idea of using avatars to make a product web page more compelling. Sure, have your web copy, but add an avatar that appeals to people on a different level. McAfee apparently tried this with one of their virus programs and it made a big difference in conversion rate over just a web page with copy.

Perhaps in a product world where most of the products from you and your competitors offer basically the same thing, an avatar would expand the lead gen pool by simply adding a different way of communicating to customers.