Animated characters for your website

Have you come across websites where, as soon as you load the page, you have some animated character speaking to you about their services? If you want your own website to also have something of that sort, you can have it from SitePal. I pretty much guess it should be effective, though it can be highly irritating as well. I have myself muted my volume when I encountered websites with such talking characters sometimes. But then, the visitor atleast gets the message: that there is such and such a product, which is essential for the next stage of purchasing. And so will I buy it if I were a web marketer? I don't know. $10 a month looks like a pretty high sum for such a service, though if it is going to be really effective in increasing sales, I might be happy. A McAfee case study on the website claims that way atleast!