Pudding ads in phone calls

Pudding Media is just launching the marketing of their new IP telephony service. The service is rather unique. It offers free phone calls over the Internet in exchange for showing you ads, which are relevant to your conversation. Apparently, they have a voice recognition system that monitors your call and then displays ads or content matching your conversation. This is much like what Google does within their Gmail service, which has sparked a tremendous amount of privacy issues.

The company positions their services as making phone calls interesting. As if ads (even relevant ones) really do that. What I like is that they are offering it up to content providers as a way to bring their communities together. For example, if I am a newspaper and have a story related to the current conversation about local school quality that [story] will be shown at the moment of the conversation, which should prompt further conversation and of course more advertising views. Think about the application of this to traditional forums and message boards.

Pudding Media will be one for online marketers to watch. The service is naturally one which will spread quickly and I suspect they will promote heavily within the social networks. They are being very stealthy now by having you preregister for an "invitation" to join when it is live (@ thepudding.com).

Not sure how they came about the name. I personally prefer "cake." JR

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