‘Idle time advertising’ as one may call it, is the mantra of online advertising today. This is commonly seen in the form of banner ads, pre-rolls, post-rolls and in many other forms in various Internet media like chat rooms, web sites, and download screens; and the intent of these advertisements is to not disrupt the users current activity – be it chat, email or browsing.
However, a new league of ‘idle time advertising’ has begun to take shape, and here are a few extracts of what I came across in the past week:
From the TMC.net blogsphere
And then there’s the ad-supported telephony phenomenon, which is still in its infancy. This is where advertisements are injected into call streams to off-set the cost of the call for the user and to generate new revenue streams for telephony providers. I’m not sure many consumers are ready to embrace this model, particularly since for years VoIP has been marketed on the promise that this new technology would enable a better call experience for less money. To ask consumers to sit through brief advertisements in order to get free calls may or may not work (and it will probably depend largely on the type of ads, i.e. the content). Perhaps success for ad-supported telephony will only be realized as the generations now using the Web as a social networking tool mature and come to accept such business models as the “norm.”
From TechCrunch
An open-source operating system like Android for the set-top box could change that. If creating applications for set-top boxes was more like creating applications for the Web, we’d be able to do a lot more things with our TVs—especially if those set-top boxes were also connected to the Web. Want instant messaging and caller ID on your TV? No problem. Want customized information widgets for the TV that scroll breaking news, weather, sports scores or stock quotes from sources you choose in your own ticker at the bottom of the screen? No problem. Want to turn that annoying ticker off? No problem. Want to control the camera angles on that basketball game? No problem. Want to add the live video stream from your friend’s cell phone who is at the game? No problem. Want to create your own video mashup of fight scenes from various movies that you can edit right on your TV and share with others on their TVs? No problem.
And now I am thinking of what other ‘idle times’ could be utilized for inserting some form of advertising. Here are a few things I came up with:
Queues: An overhead screen showing advertisements in counters where one would expect a queue (coffee shops, banks, various ticket counters)
Travel: A marquee screen in bus terminals, inside busses, inside trains and in the back side of the passenger seats in busses trains and airplanes.
Elevators: Waiting for an elevator is as boring as being in one, especially if your workplace is in a high-rise building. I wouldn’t mind watching an ad or two during that time.
Toilets: BBC’s page says that the average person visits the toilet 2,500 times a year – about six to eight times a day. In my opinion that is a lot of coverage if you want to place your ads in their toilets.
That is all I could think of, and I will come back to post here if anything else occurs to me. These ideas may have been implemented already, but I haven’t seen one (except Fashion TV showing in a small video screen right above a urinal in a restroom, in one of the bars in Bangalore!)
