NEW! Incoming Call Marketing

It’s Friday - the day of the week when many of us like to surf the Web or the email inbox for a small distraction before the weekend starts. So I figure it’s as good a day as any to share another example of Marketing WITHOUT Meaning…

This week I didn’t have to look hard to find something provocative to write about. Despite multiple layers of spam protection that often leaves clients’ messages sitting in “mailMAX” purgatory alongside come-ons for male enhancement products, a sales message with multiple attachments made it through unscathed from an individual at Xipto.com. Here’s the unedited pitch:

Hi, Bob-

We have just completed our launch for Cincinnati Bell wireless subscribers.  Xipto allows cell phone users to choose messages to play out when they receive incoming calls.  The format is a 25 second mp3 clip that is introduced by a two-second ‘Your friend supports the following message.’ The messages are about brands, causes, events, or passions — messages that are relevant to reflective [huh?] of the individual cell phone subscribers.

We just started marketing Xipto last week, and already hundreds of CBW subscribers have signed up to endorse messages and those messages are playing out to their incoming callers.

Here are a few links and tools that you can explore, along with our press release below.  We would like to present Xipto to you next week — might you be free on Wednesday, September 18 at 9:30 a.m. I promise you’ll see the potential of Xipto as an innovative marketing tool.

Thanks very much.

Jill (not the real name)”

The gist, I figured, was that I could enable my phone to spam incoming callers with ad-supported messages of my choosing. Great! As a meaningful marketing practioner, I felt it was my duty to check out Xipto.com and the MP3 samples of what kinds of messages are “relevant to reflective” (per the email above) to people I might be calling. Here’s an example of what your friends could be hearing when they dial you up this weekend:

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The bonus: you can get paid every time a friend hears the relevant to reflective message you choose! Xipto doesn’t give specifics, but the website states that there is either a cash-back or donation option for the brands you market to your callers. Which makes one jump to quickly calculate the CPM on a year of phone calls - especially if incoming solicitor calls count!

Despite the Xipto sales rep’s emails and phone calls, I decided not to take the meeting. I cannot see how anyone would agree to sign up for or listen into such a service. One might note that more than 150 million numbers have been registered on the federal do-not-call list. More Americans have registered for this list than have registered to vote! The bottom line is that ad models that depend on a few seconds of interruption are increasingly driving people away entirely. Tests of pre-roll video ads show a 75% abandon rate. How many calls friends are you willing to lose in order to spread your “message” and make a nickel?

Once again, marketers of all types need to accept that unwanted advertising is a failed business model. In a separate iMedia article I read this week, Ted McConnell, interactive innovation director at Procter & Gamble, probably said it best: “I don’t think we will ever buy into a model that relies on personalized, unsolicited messages in a private addressable channel such as a telephone - and neither will consumers.” Amen.