• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 5, 2006

Ironically, the most under-utilized part of the mobile phone for marketing is voice. Texting, WAP, and mobile TV gets so much attention these days that it is easy to forget that the spoken word is still the most powerful, certainly the most popular, mode of communication at work on the handset.

Perhaps it's the checkered legacy of telemarketing at work here. But aside from some token programs involving a few TV shows (the oft-cited "Veronica Mars" campaign) and Stephen King calling us to promote his recent book release, I have seen little rethinking of the voice channel in the current rush of marketers into mobile. Surely there must be more ways to leverage this medium than we have seen so far. Yeah, okay, all of you PR flacks working for the startups I haven't heard about yet, go ahead and send me your press releases....

For the time being, however, I have tripped across a few interesting uses of the spoken word in mobile marketing. Voice recognition continues to be a revolution-in-waiting for computing interfaces, and most of the mobile search engines are exploring how to integrate vocal queries that circumvent the dreaded handset keypad. One product I tried at CTIA, Call for Content, tries to use the voice channel to ease the pain of short code entry. Rather than texting, you simply dial the brand's pre-designated number and VR menus or touch tone choices let the user drill into the content or choices they want. By kicking the interaction into a VR flow, the brand can further target the offer to users' needs and even fill data points in a CRM database much more efficiently than via SMS exchanges or even a WAP-based interaction. Once you settle on the specific kind of content the user wants, the C4C system pushes a WAP link via SMS.

Everyone at the recent CTIA convention got their hand-outs from Ki-Bi, a company that uses what we might call the screech channel, again to deliver mobile content more efficiently. After dialing into a number, a modem-like audio signal tells the system what content to deliver to you via an SMS-WAP push. I imagine this model could accommodate VR menu trees for more targeted delivery. The demo we all got at CTIA was a credit-card-sized hand-out, but the signal could be embedded in a kiosk or stand-up, bound into a magazine, etc. While it doesn't use voice per se, Ki-Bi does exploit the voice channel on a phone on a poster a magazine. And I have to say that the success rate for systems like these, which direct-dial to content links are better than many of the programs I have been testing lately that rely on SMS and WAP entry.

Among the most interesting uses of the voice channel I have seen recently, however, involves using voice very simply as a content delivery vehicle. Some mobile veterans will remember UpSnap as a very early player in mobile search, one of the first to use the SMS shortcode+query+zip formula. It seemed to stay beneath the radar while competing engine ascended, but UpSnap's blip just reappeared after some new funding and the acquisition of a voice technology firm.

In a partnership with the Oscars last winter, UpSnap delivered audio content about the awards show in response to an SMS query. Texting "Oscar" to "2Snap" returned an SMS menu of content options for a history of the event, the top nominees in the various categories, etc. You texted back your choice to get a phone call that connected you to the short audio program.

The approach still needs work. Most of the Oscar audio seemed to be extracted from video shorts that ABC already had made for other uses. Needless to say, film explosions and unlabeled actor voices do not play well on a phone, and the variable audio levels on a film track are disorienting as audio-only. UpSnap also has radio stations it sends over the voice channel, and I can't say I am too crazy about that experience either. This underscores the obvious: that mobile audio programming needs to be more platform-aware: clear voices, talk radio formatting.

Nevertheless, I think there is real undiscovered ground here. In the time it takes to fumble a short code and a WAP push, let alone wait for a phone to make its data connection and call up a mobile Web page, you could dial in and get much of what you need by voice. After all, most of us are looking for one-minute data grabs, perhaps even an extended marketing message or the voice of a celebrity endorser. Better still, you don't have to remember to steal a minute while waiting on line.

One of the challenges of the mobile data channel in the U.S. market is that we do not have the same use cases as Europe and Asia because we drive much more than we take public transportation. When exactly are we supposed to stare at our phone screen? On the Starbucks line? Imagine a system where you could assemble a custom set of audio updates to your favorite content sources, much as you do podcasts on an MP3 player. They are all compiled so that a single dial-in gives you back-to-back market updates, headlines, sports scores, horoscopes, celebrity quotes, or whatever. Just pop your phone into the dashboard cup holder, put it on speaker phone or Bluetooth headphone setting, and listen.

Instead of trying to make mobile phones more like a PC, perhaps we should think about making them more like radio.