• USA Today, Thursday, January 18, 2007 11:30 AM

CareerBuilder.com today launches Age-O-Matic.com, at which consumers can upload a photo, age the person 50 years and e-mail it to friends. Message: The stress of a bad job will age you. The move is part of a recent wave of personal viral marketing that gets consumers engaged with product messages.

This week, Masterfoods USA's M&M's unveiled BecomeAnMM.com, where consumers can create likenesses of themselves as an M&M character in 27 million possible combinations and e-mail the results to friends. Over the holidays, OfficeMax allowed consumers to "elf" themselves at ElfYourself.com, where they could upload photos and have faces appear on a dancing elf that could be e-mailed to others.

Marketers can no longer use "down-your-throat" ads that just push messages at consumers, says Richard Castellini, consumer-marketing head for CareerBuilder.com. As traditional advertising continues to lose power, he says, personalized marketing builds brand buzz.

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