How big a proportion of your business comes from VoIP providers as opposed to call centers and radio stations etc?
It has so far been mainly the radio stations and call centers. We serve over 450 radio and TV stations: businesses with high call volumes. VoIP is a new sector for us.
Can non-telco businesses really generate high call volumes?
It is interesting how people treat only Internet as the interactive media whereas radio has been interactive since the day when the DJ sat behind the turn table and took calls on listener lines. One of our radio station customers generates about a quarter million calls a day. Another customer, Radio Disney, does about 5 million calls a month across their network.
How did you stumble upon this idea of ad insertion into telephony call streams?
We were originally in the business of collecting data on inbound radio station calls, data related to what people wanted to hear. Along the way we realized that we could turn this into a targeted marketing opportunity where we could promote complementary products and services: Movie releases, CD releases, Concert tours, etc. And it was very successful ... to the extent that we had no more traffic left to monetize and so we had to explore other high call volume segments.
Which segments did you probe after the radio stations?
After radio stations and call centers, we explored the calling cards segment. We work with a lot of calling card companies including the largest calling card company in the country, IDT. We are picking hundreds of millions of calls from calling card companies on a monthly basis. We have now focussed our attention towards VoIP providers. We are about to sign two large deals.
Sounds exciting. Before we discuss this further, can you very briefly tell me a bit about your technology?
We answer phone calls on behalf or our customers on a hosted manner with an IVR ASP kind of solution that sits in the network cloud. We built this IVR platform in house. It works with numerous telecom switches and PBXs. It is a standards based VoiceXML product.
Your business would really scale if you are able to sign up telephony providers. Why have you so far not targeted people like Skype?
We have been in talks with Skype before, especially when they launched the flat rate SkypeOut plan of $15 per month some time back. And we offered to pick up that tab for free. We would have been very happy to have Skype offer the SkypeOut service and let the advertisers and marketers cover the cost. While you are waiting for the connection time, we could drop in some ad supported media.
Would it be targeted marketing though?
Yes. For a call from say San Francisco to Boston, we would play an ad relevant to the San Francisco residents.
What else do you have in store for VoIP providers?
We could help them turn into a content delivery platform. In addition to differentiating themselves on price these service providers can enable 2 or 3 digit dialling for retrieving free audio content on various things such as weather, news etc.
Are we looking at turning our phones into content delivery platforms then?
What is the sales pitch of a telephony provider today? Most of the time you are selling a commodity product. You could jazz it up by mentioning all the fantastic enhanced features. But the fact is that the decision of the consumer for most part comes down to price. That is what telephony has been like for ever. Our pitch is that now you have the traffic volume be something other than a cheaper service provider. The Cisco phone or other phones out there that are connected to your networks can be turned into audio delivery platforms, various types of audio based info and more.
Who else are you targeting among the telecom players apart from the VoIP providers?
We are also talking to cell operators, especially in Europe. But it is going to hit the US too.
Can you point at a couple of successful case studies where you have been involved?
One of our customers IDT whom I mentioned before is on target to earn between $1.5 million to $2 million with us this financial year. That is how people measure our success, the checks we write them.
When a radio station gets a call in, how do you know who is calling and what demographic profile he fits and therefore what ad to play?
There are some active and some passive ways to gather information on the caller. First of all we collect the street address or the zip code of the caller through reverse lookup. That gives the geographic location of the caller. Then you can work further. Our radio station clientele typically put a couple of automated questions to the caller to help our system better select the ads.
In case of calling card implementations, we typically know from the pin whether the calls are being made to Mexico or Dominican Republic or Russia etc. Our system then decides upon which language to serve the ad in.
You would obviously not be able to get info on things like income group etc.
It depends how much information the client passes over to our system. If a call center has such data and is willing to share with our system, we can then better target the ads.
How much ad money can be earned through these audio shots?
Our rates are very good. We offer 25 to 30 dollars per CPM [cost per 1000 CALLS]. We don’t sell everything on a CPM basis. Sometimes we get paid on a CPC basis. On average we are doing about 2.5 to 3 cents per call. When you look at the margins of existing telephony it is very good incremental revenue.