Business Opportunities Weblog

June 20, 2008 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

The Wall Street Journal:

Callers stuck on hold waiting for a customer-service rep have long been subjected to the sounds of Muzak. Now, companies are taking advantage of these captive moments to serve up some different messages.

From Burger King to Bank of America, marketers are replacing the canned tunes with advertising. Someone calling into a radio station might hear a movie trailer, while an executive dialing into a conferencing service might be served an ad for the office-supplies store Staples.

The start-ups behind this new technology say customers are particularly susceptible to marketing pitches while they are on hold because they are attentively waiting for someone to arrive on the other end of the line.

But marketers have to tread carefully. Being stuck on hold is a big consumer pet peeve, and there is a danger of riling customers — or potential customers — even more by blitzing them for ads. For that reason, ads tend to be short — typically less than 30 seconds. And there are some no-nos in terms of what to pitch and when. For example, a company that sells consumer electronics isn’t likely to serve up ads for a new TV to a caller waiting for someone to help him fix a computer that he bought from the same company.

One of the start-ups that serves a big chunk of the ads for marketers is VoodooVox. It signs up marketers, usually in tandem with an agency, and finds a publisher to be the platform for it. The company’s ads play during about 320 million calls a month, a number that the New York company says has increased 20% every month this year. Companies like VoodooVox split the revenue with the “publisher” of the call, such as a radio station or a conferencing service.

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Photo by woodsy.

In Communication, Customer Service, Technology | 1 Comment