I don’t find the idea of ads on (or around) my boarding pass all that offensive, particularly if it’s, say, a coupon for a place behind security or at my destination where I can save some money, or rather spend a little less.

No doubt, advertising is simply going to have to be smarter.

Scott Hamilton here. Pres/CEO of VoodooVox.

The goal for all advertising is to be relevant and informative. Moreover, there must be some level of fair trade associated with it; ie, one gets a better or free product/service because of ad support.

In the case of In-Call Media, which my company’s area, we subsidize the operations of some telco apps and make others better. For example, in the case which Om references, letting a caller know an airline has introduced a new flight to their home country from their current city is information, not advertising. Similarly, when a person is on-hold listening to a looped message about the importance of their call to the entity ignoring them, giving the caller the option of hearing news headline, sports, or entertainment gossip, etc, improves the hold experience. In both cases I would argue the caller’s experienced is improved through In-Call Media.

In the case of voice apis, the question is really how one a) defines and api, and b) intends to monetize it.

Our approach, MyVox, simply gives developers the ability to capture voice input through the phone and mash it up however they see fit. It’s a free service to developers, and in return we serve ads into the call stream. We have hundreds of developers generating hundreds of call each daily. Still puny call volume, but the service has been deployed for fewer than 3 months and more developers come on line daily with their clever phone app, and soon someone will come up with something many folks won’t be able to do without.

Telephony and advertising are both scale businesses. If one intends to make money being a telco, you better be selling 10s of millions of minutes daily. Similar volume is needed in advertising. We’re simply combining the two sectors, having deplyed an audio ad serving platform in to hundreds of telco “publishers” generating hundreds of millions of calls on a monthly basis.

As the marginal cost of providing telephony continues to approach zero, new revenue models are becoming available to an industry that has really only had a metered usage model. Ad support is viable option for many telco services today, and I believe ultimately most of the telco prods/svcs we’re currently paying for can be covered by an opt-in advertising experience.

@whartonfamily: thanks very much for the heads up on the Saudi’s view toward advertising. We’ll calibrate our international expansion plans accordingly.

Are you serious? Wow…. that is an eye opener

Do you realize what the unused rate of minutes (and therefore $$$) is on pre-paid cards? I’m thinking some wild number between 7 and 12.5 percent. It’s some serious coin ….

There was also an article in the NY Times recently on how international audiences don’t recieve any ads as they are irrelevant (want to buy a mortgage in Saudi Arabia?

How about some real companies with a real business model based on adding value vs. annoying the general public.

Scott

http://www.ilocus.com/2007/12/interview_with_j_scott_hamilto.html

there are certain instances in a phone call where an ad can be gracefully accommodated. eg. insert the audio ad instead of the ringing sound.

That’s been fixed; apologies for the confusion.

best, Carolyn

Far more effective is solid use of direct marketing and PR, and in a certain sense – sponsorships. Like what BMW is doing with TedTalks on the Miro player. There are no other ads except for a BMW brand ad on the tail of the videos.

CDW did something, albeit extremely annoyingly, with some recent tech infrastructure videos of conference presentations I was looking at. It was the same ad, over and over again, forced to watch before each video. And there were over 30 videos.

Anyway, the answer is less ads, more targeting, and smarter integration. Its more of a content issue than a technology issue. Back in the 1990s when I owned an interactive agency, this was exactly the kind of stuff I most enjoyed working on – translating the needs of a brand to their target audience and marrying it with existing content in a non-intrusive but value-add manner. Its a challenge, but if you pull it off well, the rewards are big both to consumers and marketers.

or

“There Are Ads Just About Everywhere”

??

Do you mean Their Ads… or The Ads… or There Are Ads…. ?