Another sign of the current bubble is all the models emerging claiming to be able to offer cheap or free mobile calls, subsidised by advertising. It really takes me back to 1999 when we had ideas like free computers for everyone - all the lucky computer owners would have to do was expose themselves to X ads a day. Or when Buy.com’s business strategy was to sell goods below cost and make their money from (you guessed it) advertising.
The latest that’s been floating around is advertising ringback tones - actually it’s been around for a couple of months now. A company called Perceptive Impression thinks that we’ll all be able to enjoy free calls in return for giving permission to advertisers to use our ringback tones.
Just in case this isn’t perfectly clear, when someone phones you, they won’t hear a phone ring, but a soundtrack advertising some product or service.
It’s one thing to agree that you’ll expose yourself to advertising to get some kind of subsidy, but it’s another entirely to inflict it on friends, family and colleagues. I can’t think of a more effective way to declare that you’re a cheapskate, utterly uncool or unattractively impoverished.
If anyone signs up for this kind of programme, I suspect they’ll be the poor and the desperate - exactly the kind of target audience who will be the most unattractive to the advertisers that might be persuaded to trial the service.
A further problem is the cost per call. If we take the average at what (?) 10 - 50 cents a call, if that’s to be covered by advertising, we’re talking $100 - $500 CPM (Cost Per Thousand). By way of comparison, you’d be doing well as an online advertising media owner to be charging in the region of $10 CPM - very well indeed actually.
So I can’t see this having legs, quite frankly.
Aural spam.
I agree completely. I used to work on a similar idea a couple of years ago. The idea was that you could make free phone calls using your mobile phone, if you agreed to hear an advertisement at the beginning. Of course, to enter this service you would have to tell us everything about you, except your social security code, so that we could offer you targeted advertising. Since free SMS (with an advert) was a success, I believed that this idea would work too. But
1) The costs that I would have to ask to advertisers were simply too high. When somebody uses their mobile phone to call your 0800 number it costs you here in the Netherlands app. 37 eurocents. Even if you limit the call to 3 minutes, you would have to ask at least 1.5 Euro for an advertiser each time somebody hears their advertisement. Much too high.
2) It turned out that at the end of the last millennium several companies tried to offer something similar at payphones. I can’t remember the name of the companies involved, but since none of them existed a year later, I assumed that the idea doesn’t work.
Note however that free411.com seems to work just fine in the US.
Guys, I have a slightly different take on this. A while back I blogged about what I believe to be an elegant way for Google (and perhaps only Google would be capable of this particular execution)to implement a version of the model you mention wherein a consumer could have cellular calls subsidized by Google/Google Advertisers by listening to a brief commercial at the beginning of each call.
Now before you go and say that this can’t work or that no one with money would ever subject themselves to this hear me out. First let me say that if implemented the way I envision, I WOULD USE THE SERVICE FROM TIME TO TIME, not because I need my calls subsidized but because the value to the high end consumer is in the commercial, not the free call!
Allow me to explain. There would of course be several caveats to this implementation. First, Google needs to know enough about you and what you are interested in to serve you a relevant ad. They can only know this from what you tell them or from what you allow them to know of you via searches or if you have their Desktop Search which indexes the content on your computer. If neither of these are true Google can’t serve you appropriate ads and will instead refuse the call with a message to the effect of “In order to provide you with relevant ads and our advertisers with appropriate potential customers we need to know more about you. At this time Google cannot locate an ad in our inventory suitable to your interests. Thanks for using Google.”
On the other hand(and this is where I would use the system) You should be able to force or game the tool into serving you exactly the sort of ad you want. How? Search for the same things a few different times. I want a Sony PSP. If I Google it a few times looking for discounts, I should hopefully get an ad for this or something very similar the next time I use the system. This is a win/win/win. Google gets revenue from the advertiser, I get a discount on a PSP (plus a free call) and the advertiser gets value for the advertising dollar spent.
Granted, this isn’t always going to work and I’m not so naive to think that advantage could be taken on both sides if the system isn’t tuned exceedingly well, but if you consider that this is a totally optional service, and that you can always hang up and redial if you don’t like the ad, it seems like a good way for Google to extend their inventory in a way that consumers like and which could be very successful for advertisers.
Oliver Starr
http://www.mobile-weblog.com
A few more words on Google PhoneVertising
By Oliver Starr Recently Russell at Mobhappy put up a post discussing free calls in Exchange for listening to advertisements on your mobile. They don’t feel like this is a good idea, whereas I have a slightly different take…
Umm, didn’t Spotcast try this in 2000 in HongKong and fail? http://www.financialexpress.com/fe/daily/20000331/fst31032.html for the original proposition and I’ve googled spotcast and can’t find anything current on it so I’m guessing it did die.
I also think it would be *really* annoying to hear an ad when you’re in a rush to talk to the other person and it would just cause even more frustration. Even if it knew something about you, we’re a long way from advertising in context where we can match user history with personal preferences with user location matched to what that user might be up to in that location (work, school, home etc). Maybe one day but I can’t see it anytime soon.