Ring Back Tones
Marketing Wonk has posted about _‘Ring Back Tones’ New Mobile Marketing Medium_, pointing to this article on Brand Republic. Brand Republic simply points out that Ring Back Tones, the sounds you hear when you call somebody instead of the standard boring ring, will be very big in the future and that T-Mobile is launching it in Europe, predicting 20% penetration within the end of the year.
The juicy bit comes from Marketing Wonk, as they point out that we might be hearing ads instead of ring tones in the future. This might actually be an interesting thing. I mean you can take 10 seconds to pick up anyway and you can push over a marketing message in 10 seconds.
There is another thing that might be very fun with this though, even though I will still have to look into this a bit more to find out how it works. You could have several different ring tones, or voices, available dependent on your status on your IM tool on your phone. You could do that now with having an answering machine directly on your 6600 and changing the message people get depending on where you are. What I mean though is that you link the status from your phone (Meeting, Work, Out, Home, DND, …) with your wireless village IM client and via that to the network, which will give a short information about my status. It should only show on the screen of the caller really, but for now we are just thinking ring tones, or voices.
“I am currently in a meeting, please leave a message.”
“I am at work so just give it some time as the phone is set to silent.”
“I am at the movies so all I can do is tell you if the movie was good afterwards. If it is urgent, please send an SMS.”
Lots of stuff would be great there. There is really no reason for the ring tone to be such a stupid ring tone, other than the network not being capable of individualizing it. This might be changing in the future though. Interesting to think about.