This past holiday season, Colle+McVoy and Yahoo! Messenger proved that although traditional door-to-door caroling may be a thing of the past, online caroling has just begun.
With the help of Colle+McVoy, Yahoo! Messenger launched a holiday campaign that allowed its most loyal IM users to send virtual carolers to surprise and delight their friends and family. Through this innovative “Emoticarolers” online campaign, Yahoo! Messenger Power Users (and anyone else who wanted to share their holiday spirit) were able to create personalized carols that were performed by virtual singers on digital doorsteps worldwide.
Although the holiday season has passed, the site- www.emoticarolers.com is still up and running. Users can choose four Emoticarolers, which are 3-D animated characters based on the Yahoo! Messenger brand emoticons. Then they select a well-loved holiday jingle (Jingle Bells, Deck the Halls or Auld Lang Syne) that they can send as is or compose custom lyrics for. A unique text-to-speech technology was adapted to create different voices for each Emoticaroler. The application then combines the individual voices into one choir. The resulting carol can be sent using Yahoo! Messenger or e-mail, as well as embedded on a Web site, downloaded or posted on a blog.
The site is a success, generating more than 1.3 million views in just over a month, with more than 1 million songs created. The site was passed along to friends and family more than 580,000 times, previewed on blogs over 190,000 times, and recognized as a featured holiday Web site on FWA.com.
