Hold the phone – those sacred moments of silence that tick by while your call is connecting are about to be gobbled up … by advertising.
Austin company Vocal Media plans to deliver eight-second audio advertisements into international telephone calls. The ads will be targeted by destination and origin area codes. So, if someone in the United States is calling a friend in Mexico, the caller would hear a short ad in the time between dialing the number and the connection going through.
Company founder Marty McCrea says the initiative can open up difficult-to-reach demographics to advertisers. “Any sort of sponsor that wants to reach a really hard to target ethnic immigrant audience in the United States can utilize this service and it will deliver them in to a captive audience – quite literally, they’re waiting for their phone call to connect – with 100% traceability,” McCrea said.
Leap Wireless International Inc. (LEAP) introduced a similar service called Slice in 2001. Slice allowed customers to choose from a variety of content categories and offered personalization features that would also allow advertisers to monitor, control and obtain reports on their promotional campaigns in real-time over the Internet and target specific audiences and demographic segments based on information customers volunteered when they personalized their Slice service.
McCrea, an MBA student at the University of Texas, said the ads would cost between $30 and $40 per 1,000 ad impressions, compared to about $250 for a direct mail ad campaign.
Vocal Media is one of the competitors at the 2011 Global Venture Labs Investment Competition – the self-described Super Bowl of investment competitions – which this year features 40 competitors from 12 countries and all over the United States. The competition is taking place as part of the McCombs School of Business’s Venture Week, which started Wednesday and concludes Saturday.
The startup has a working prototype and has just secured seed funding of $150,000. It has a strategic partnership with calling card company Quantum Global Networks Inc., and it is in talks with carriers that are being stung by call plans that offer unlimited calls to Mexico. Such companies see Vocal Media as a potential way to offset the costs of such plans, McCrea claims.
Vocal Media will buy “dead time” from service providers and sell it as ad space in eight-to-ten-second allotments to advertisers. It then helps source or produce locally relevant ad content, and takes a cut of up to three cents per ad impression.
The company, which plans to stay in Austin, expects to go to market June 1.
Would you like all your dreams to come true? Follow Marc Speir on twitter @truthorcon.
