Avatar advertising

With the huge christmas Avatar advertising campaign (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=191855) by smindsrt for his site sift directory are we seeing a new direction in advertising.

There has been sig advertising from as far back as I know but never avatar advertising.

Do you think Avatar and Sig advertising is effective? Have you tried it?

Obviously I use my sig and it gets a few clicks (should post more I guess) and many others do too. What are your experiences?

 

http://wmseo.com/2006/12/08/avatar-marketing/

feel free to leave a comment there.

 

A massive leap in traffic. I think as this is all new it has gone viral. I can't see this having such a large impact for others down the line. I mean DP is huge and Site Sift is pretty big.

Would this be as effective for the smaller guy (that also includes gals)

 

no, read my article. You need "heavy weights"...

 

I think it's rather silly. sigs I can understand, but not avatars. at least not in the long run.

it'll also quickly become saturated and confusing. before I used to use avatars at a glance to identify posters... when four people in the same thread have the same one it's just frustrating, doesn't really make me want to head over and check out their service.

 

it's not silly.

great link bait, great exposure

 

Good as long as each member has different avatar

 

It was great to start because site sift has all this buzz around it now, but it could easily go like the million dollar homepage... lots of copycats once the novelty has worn off.

Plus, like disgust said, it gets annoying.

 

link bait without conversions means nothing.

getting traffic doesn't mean much. if they see a significant ROI, that's something else... and my guess is they won't be seeing much of one. if they do, it'll be temporary.

it's getting attention because it's new and novel. that won't last forever. I admit I checked the site out to see what they were advertising and check out their business model-- never once did it cross my mind to actually bother submitting to those directories.

 

I agree that everyone with the same avatar can be confusing. As a branding exercise it seems like a very good idea.

What about a partially branded avatar accompanied by a sig link. This way you could still recognize the poster by the avatar. By partially branded I mean something like a logo or domain embossed over the avatar.

 

A link on the avatar to the site would be be perfect as far as the advertiser is concerned, but I doubt DP will go in that direction.

 

what's good for advertisers is not the same as what's good for users.

if avatars were live links on DP this would go on like crazy and quite frankly it'd drive me insane it's hard enough to tell people apart with the rates we have now.

 

Well, I know that I personally don't tend to visit sites that I see in avatars..