Screenmates bring brand characters to life
Screenmates have been particularly popular in the entertainment industry and have also been developed for pharmaceutical, consumer packaged goods, automotive, sports and other vertical markets.
Let's face it, playing with animated characters on your desktop is inherently fun, which is why the entertainment industry developed some of the first screenmates for movies and videos. Early screenmates for Pink Panther, Powerpuff Girls, Pokemon, ET, Harry Potter, Tom and Jerry and the Grinch were very popular, with the Grinch getting more than 8 million downloads.
Consumer brands were also early developers of screenmates for brand such as Reebok, Kangol, Kraft, Twinings, Coke and Lipton. Automotive brands such as Uniroyal, Toyota and General Motors all built early screenmates as well.
Even today entertainment brands continue to be one of the most enthusiastic builders of screenmates, except now screenmates are often a feature of a much more powerful branded desktop application. In the case of "Family Guy," Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has built several versions of desktop applications that include screenmate characters. The Stewie character screenmate has been particularly popular and has even been adapted for the Zumobi mobile platform.
The Nick.com LaunchPad is a particularly powerful screenmate communicator that combines the fun of playing with favorite characters on the desktop with powerful, multi-channel, personalized brand content channels. LaunchPad currently features three full-featured screenmate characters: SpongeBob SquarePants, Fairly Oddparents and Avatar. In this application, the screenmates are themselves a type of updatable content, with new screenmates being added to the application over time. The user can also select from multiple character-themed skins for the application. Updateable content channels keep the users connected to clips, games and other content associated with their favorite shows.
With the success of Southwest Airline's Ding application, the travel and resort industry is adopting branded desktop applications as an important element of its online marketing and CRM efforts. Some brands have found that incorporating a screenmate character into the BDA improves download rates and usage by increasing the "fun factor." Destination resorts have used screenmates to promote new rides, games and promotional initiatives. As mentioned above, Vail Resorts has been using its Trevvor character in the Vail SnowMate BDA for several years. Trevvor was initially only a skier, but so many users wrote in that Vail gave Trevvor a whole new set of snowboarder tricks in year two of the application.
Some of the world's most famous characters have been created by consumer product brands, some of which have been brought to life on the desktop. The Pillsbury Doughboy danced on the desktop as a part of the Pillsbury Desktop Doughboy recipe collector. One of the most successful consumer brand screenmates was a cat called Felix developed by Purina; millions of applications were downloaded over the several years the campaign ran.
Another very popular desktop animal is Kimberly-Clark's Cottonelle Puppy, which has been internationalized into several different markets, including the Andrex Playful Puppy (U.K.), the Cottonelle Puppy (U.S.), Hakle Puppy (Germany), Kleenex Puppy (Australia), Page Puppy (Holland), Scott Puppy (South America) and Sujay Puppy (Taiwan). Internationally, more than 2 million puppies have been downloaded. New seasonal and promotional puppy tricks are developed and updated to the application over the course of the year to keep the user experience fresh, and various promotions are incorporated into the screenmate user interface including a recent user-generated video contest.
The Roche Flu Tracker was a branded desktop application that served up localized flu threat information to the user, including an animated map showing spread of the flu over the season. An important aspect of the program was to teach the user the difference between having a cold and having the flu. To this end, two characters were developed called Basil and The Bug who acted out various aspects of cold and flu symptoms and also helped explain how to use the application.
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