Virgin Mobile Offers Airtime in Exchange for Ad Viewing
In a mobile-phone industry first, Virgin Mobile USA kicks off a new service today to reward its customers with airtime minutes for interacting with its advertisers.
The service, called SugarMama, allows Virgin’s customers to view content online or on their phones from Pepsi, Xbox and truth, a smoking-prevention campaign, garnering extra minutes in return. Customers opt-in for the program at VirginMobileUSA.com and can earn extra minutes in three ways:
- With AdTime, customers view an advertiser’s streaming video ad on the Web site. For each minute spent, customers earn a minute of airtime (with a maximum of 75 minutes earnable per month).
- The same rule applies for QTime, but instead, customers spend five minutes answering survey questions and providing feedback to advertisers.
- With Textime, one brand sends two text messages to customers’ mobile phones during the course of a day. The messages include links to micro-sites, coupon codes or special offers to which customers can accept by sending a free text message to earn airtime.
After interacting with brands, Virgin Mobile customers can click through to the advertiser’s Web site or to promotional offers on micro sites.
The approach allows advertisers—who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a three-month sponsorship of the service—to build ad clicks and Web site traffic as Virgin rewards customers with the free airtime perk, said Saj Cherian, Virgin’s director of market development.
“SugarMama really came out of a dialogue we had with our customers,” Cherian said. “We had an extraordinary amount of customers going to our Web site all the time…and a lot of brands came to us to say we’d like to get in front of [them].”
The Warren, NJ-based company found customers wanted to be rewarded for spending time interacting with advertisers if they could opt-in, if the brands had a unique offer and if the content was entertaining and relevant, Cherian said.
Brands like Pepsi, Xbox and truth are a good fit with Virgin’s 4 million customers, who are largely teenagers to young adults, Cherian said.
“We’ve given [our customers] incentives before, but in terms of an actual service where there’s a way for [customers] to get free minutes, this is the first we’ve done, and a first in the industry,” Cherian said.
Virgin expects to expand the scope of the service to offer advertisers the opportunity to showcase longer content. The company launched in 2002 and is a joint venture between Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Sprint Nextel.
Virgin partnered with Palos Verdes Estates, CA-based Ultramercial, LLC, to offer the program. The Ultramercial model grants users free access to premium content in exchange for engaging commercials.
