Gary Gygax And David Ogilvy Fistfight In Heaven

I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent post on Creative Beef about advertising agency “characters,” along with Kristin Maverick’s discussion on bitemarks about the staff of Dunder Mifflin as they exist online: they’re on YouTube, they Twitter, they post to a company website that really exists.

There is actually a name for fictional personalities who have been aggressively integrated into the lives of those with free will. They’ve been around for a very long time, and if you were ever a role-playing geek, as I once was, you know what they’re called. They’re non-player characters.

Non-player characters are like the toys temporarily animated by the parents of small children. They are not real, and the people controlling them are under no illusions that they are, nor does their realism hold up under much inspection. And yet, without them, the game isn’t nearly as fun.

I think that non-player characters (NPCs, as they’re properly called) play an important…well, role…in conversational marketing. They give the advertiser the chance to personify itself in a way that’s more human and interactive than a logo or a mascot.

Some other examples that come to mind: those AOL marketing bots that add themselves to your buddy list and then wait patiently for you to get curious enough to strike up a conversation with them.

What others are there? Are they effective? How far back, historically, does this go, do you think?

photo by Joi