Today I’ve had two different conversations with people who are talking about what they have heard in the way of advertising supported telephony.
The first company company wants to use a speech recognition engine that listens to the conversation and then serves you ads based on what you discussed. To me this has zero merit unless you never want to pay for anything. But advertising to the free it’s me crowd is not a real money maker in my book.
The second unnamed company wants to insert commercials in the dead air between the time that you dial and press send on your mobile phone and the call hits the receiving party’s switch which is when the phone rings. That has some merit.
The idea of ad supported mobile phones has been tried years ago in Italy. It bombed. I think though there is a market for that, but ads based on the context of my conversations…well that’s just a bit too much big brother for me.
People are so smart these days and we’ll never escape from ads!