No, nothing to do with the misguided creation from the new Star Wars movies, Jajah is a mobile network that allows advertising during the time you would usually hear a dialing tonein return for substantially reduced call costs to the end user.
It’s an interesting place to advertise – phone conversations instinctively feel like a very private space in which such communcations wouldn’t be welcome. But we are back to the old permission marketing model. If you are a cash strapped student who is sensitive to price points, or someone for whom the telephone is more of a tool than a channel then receiving advertising in this medium would be fine, particularly as you will receive GPRS related information eg a local restaurant or service will advertise to you.
My questions are around the benefit to advertisers.
1. Yes the users are captive, waiting to go through to somewhere else, but that’s not to say that their attention is automatically concentrated on what they are hearing. In my own experience I focus on what I am about to discuss, ask or say before I am finally connected. There will have to be some real creative thinking about how to capture the user’s ear.
2. If you pay a premium you get your ad heard first. What if you don’t pay a premium ? Ts is a very short window of opportunity, particularly in today’s mobile world. Answer phones come on pretty quickly, within 8 rings, that gives you about 20 seconds to communicate and almost all of that’s been taken by the first ad played. Your ad just won’t get heard.
Still it’s an interesting model and I like it when people look for the spaces between, the places no one has considered in order to communicate. Some of the best ideas in the world have come out of the creative use of those spaces.
