SIA first to try MediaRing Talk

Regional - Singapore Airlines is the first company to advertise on MediaRing Talk, a new advertising platform targeting web-based phone users, and which has over half a million or 48% of its users from China.

MediaRing's director of product marketing, Alka Chadha says the new technology allows advertisers to buy placement on the "skin" of a MediaRing Talk display panel, which appears when users make a call. It also lets companies place ads on the display itself.

"Once the call is connected, the skin comes up. We sell placements by the minute because it's talk time, and on average our calls last five minutes so we're hoping to be able to sell five placements within those five minutes," she said. The company has tied up with Double Click to serve the ads while the "skins" are served by MediaRing.

Chadha added, "One placement [for one minute], plus two rotating banners cost US$0.05."

MediaRing Talk currently allows free phone calls to eight destinations -- for calls to landlines and mobile, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, US, and Canada are the markets; for calls to landlines only, then UK, Taiwan and Australia are the available markets. Free calls are limited to 10 minutes.

Chadha says in the past week, the company has been signing up over 3,500 new users a day. At the moment, MediaRing marketing is reliant on buying key word searches.