Have you ever visited a website and suddenly a person walked across your screen? This isn’t the opening sentence of some Tron fan-fiction, I’m talking about interactive advertising. These advertisements walking all over the text you’re trying to read are fairly annoying, but to marketers they’re delightfully distracting. Latvian startup Videoavatars is providing a service to make these video overlays easier for web developers to create and implement by only adding one line of HTML to their website.
The VideoAvatar player delivers the recorded overlay on top of a website yet allows the user to still interact with the page. The avatar player’s controls allow the user to pause, replay or close the overlay. The player is also very configurable; it also allows flash animations, clickable interactivity, delays, and highlights.
You may be curious what the production process is like to get a person to walk across and promote something on your website. VideoAvatar leaves the script and actor selection up to you, but will arrange a shoot in a green screen studio. They also take care of the post-production, and will send you the completed clips so you can choose the best performance. Once it is completed, it’s only a small line of HTML to add to your website.
Advertising isn’t the only way this video overlay can be used. VideoAvatars suggests you can greet, meet, guide, ask, promote, educate, brand and so on with their services. This demo shows the use of this service to point out and highlight portions of your website.
I personally dislike anything that gets between me and a website’s content, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some clever uses come out of this service as VideoAvatar makes interactive overlays easier to implement. VideoAvatar is a part of Statupbootcamp – Copenhagen.
