Patent Grant
8468050
Advertisers seek to connect with their customers in the fullest way possible. Conventionally, this has been done by attempting to make an advertisement, such as a television commercial, humorous or alluring. For an even fuller experience, advertisers will run a commercial, or “infomercial,” for an entire half hour, often featuring a celebrity to keep the customer's attention.
No matter how alluring the content or how long the commercial, however, such conventional advertising is severely limited because the customers have no incentive to keep watching except for their own fickle curiosity. In addition, the simple viewing of an advertisement is not an interactive experience between the advertiser and the potential customer. Many advertisers, especially those offering complex products, require a dialogue with their potential customers. They need to have a conversation with their potential customers to find out their immediate needs and answer their questions in order to sell them products.
To solve these limitations and make advertisements more interactive, advertisers have resorted to inviting customers to attend live seminars in person and paying them for their time. Often the payment will take the form of a reward, such as receiving a gas grill for attending a seminar on time-share vacation homes. The customers become “participants,” as the advertisers ask them their opinions and questions as they sell them products ranging from encyclopedias to cars.
These live sales seminars achieve the full interactivity that advertisers seek with their customers. The problem with the seminars is all their logistics must be done by hand. Customers must be selected and invited to the seminar. The customers must travel to the location of the seminar. Both the customers and the advertisers must be in the same location at the same, pre-arranged time. The reward to attend the seminar, and the total attendance time required, must be fixed and agreed to beforehand, so that it is worth the trouble of travel. Payment must also be done manually, in accordance to the agreed reward. In summary, holding such live advertising seminars is quite difficult, and in many cases prohibitively expensive, because there is no device for enabling them.
Therefore, there remains a need to overcome one or more limitations in the above described existing art which is satisfied by the inventive structure and method described hereinafter.
The present invention overcomes the problems in the existing art described above by providing a method and apparatus for recruiting, communicating with, and paying participants of interactive advertising. The present invention is a system through which advertisers can recruit, communicate with, and pay their potential customers for their time. The proposed system achieves all of these functions without the advertiser or the customer having to be in the same location—all logistics are handled through the proposed system's web site, database, and communications interfaces. The proposed system enables advertisers to promote interactive seminars in which they try to sell products to potential customers. Most importantly, the advertisers are able to offer their potential customers financial rewards for their time, such as 25 cents per minute to reward a customer for listening to a sales pitch. The proposed system then provides a real-time communications link between the advertiser and customer. The proposed system automatically bills the advertiser and rewards the customer for the time that they interact.
Advantages of the invention include providing users with the capability to engage in a compensation-based interactive exchange with a provider of a selected advertisement via a real-time communications link. Contrary to current practice, users of the present invention are compensated for interacting with advertisers and engaging in seminars. Consequently, users are compensated and advertisers receive a constant flow of customers for their advertisement in which a user/customer can purchase the product contained in the advertisement.
The present invention is illustrated by way of example, and not by way of limitation, in the figures of the accompanying drawings and in which:
The present invention overcomes the problems in the existing art described above by providing a method and apparatus for recruiting, communicating with, and paying participants of interactive advertising. In the following description, for the purposes of explanation, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the present invention. It will be apparent, however, to one skilled in the art that the present invention may be practiced without some of these specific details. In addition, the following description provides examples, and the accompanying drawings show various examples for the purposes of illustration. However, these examples should not be construed in a limiting sense as they are merely intended to provide examples of the present invention rather than to provide an exhaustive list of all possible implementations of the present invention. In other instances well-known structures and devices are shown in block diagram form in order to avoid obscuring the details of the present invention.
In an embodiment, the methods of the present invention are embodied in machine-executable instructions. The instructions can be used to cause a general-purpose or special-purpose processor that is programmed with the instructions to perform the steps of the present invention. Alternatively, the steps of the present invention might be performed by specific hardware components that contain hardwired logic for performing the steps, or by any combination of programmed computer components and custom hardware components.
The present invention may be provided as a computer program product which may include a machine-readable medium having stored thereon instructions which may be used to program a computer (or other electronic devices) to perform a process according to the present invention. The machine-readable medium may include, but is not limited to, floppy diskettes, optical disks, CD-ROMs, and magneto-optical disks, ROMs, RAMs, EPROMs, EEPROMs, magnetic or optical cards, flash memory, or other type of media/machine-readable medium suitable for storing electronic instructions. Moreover, the present invention may also be downloaded as a computer program product, wherein the program may be transferred from a remote computer (e.g., a server) to a requesting computer (e.g., a client) by way of data signals embodied in a carrier wave or other propagation medium via a communication link (e.g., a modem or network connection).
System Architecture
The communications network 110 generally refers to any type of wire or wireless link enabling the transmission of voice data such as, but not limited to, a public switched telephone network, a wireless communications network, a local area network, a wide area network or a combination of networks. The communications devices 104 and 202 generally refer to any type of device (standard telephones, cellular telephones, satellite telephones or the like) capable of receiving speech from a user and providing the speech to a destination via a communications network, such as the communications network 110. In an embodiment of the present invention, the communications network 110 is a public switched telephone network and the voice transmission medium is a telephone.
The embodiment depicted in
Referring now to
The advertiser 200 can control the reward that is offered to the customer 102 to take part in the seminar. The reward could be per-minute, such as $0.50 per minute, such that if the customer took part for ten minutes, the customer would be paid $5.00. The reward could also be a flat amount, such as $10.00 or various other forms of payment. It could also be contingent on information that the customer 102 would provide during the seminar.
As depicted in
In one embodiment, this communications link will be in the form of a telephone call. The system 100 will call the customer 102 via the telephone 104 using communication interface 308 and the communication interface procedures 322. Upon the customer 102 accepting the call, the system 100 will place a separate telephone call to the advertiser 300. Upon the advertiser 200 accepting the call, the system 100 will conference together the two telephone calls, thereby connecting the advertiser 200 and customer via a real-time voice communications link 110. In this embodiment, since the system 100 initiates both telephone calls, the anonymity of both parties is preserved—neither party has knowledge of the other's telephone number. This embodiment also enables the system 100 to keep track of the time that the advertiser 200 and customer 102 spend communicating.
In one embodiment, the time the advertiser 200 spends communicating with the customer becomes the basis for rewarding the customer in accordance with the payment procedures 328. For instance, if the seminar has a 25-cents-per-minute reward, and the advertiser 200 and customer 102 speak on the telephone for 10 minutes, the system will automatically bill the advertiser $2.50 and credit the customer $2.50. The system can also collect a commission for maintaining the service, such as a 10% commission.
Alternatively, the communications link could be in the form of voice-over-IP, using the network interface 306 and network interface procedures 338. As such, the advertiser 200 and customer 102 can speak directly through their computers, 102 and 204 or handheld “personal digital assistants”, over the Internet 400. The communications-link could be in the form of a toll-free 1-800 phone call. For example, the customer would choose a seminar that is in session, then dial 1-800-SEMINAR and enter the seminar's specific extension, such as #4586, to connect to the desired seminar. The communications link could be in the form of a video connection, video-over-IP or otherwise, such that the advertiser 200 and customer 102 could see a real-time video conferencing image of the other party. Alternatively, the communications link could enable the customer to listen or view recorded information that the advertiser has prepared. Many customers could access this recorded information at the same time. The customer who listens to recorded information could upgrade the connection to a live presentation if the information is of interest. Using voice or video over-IP, a sales seminar could be a one-on-one communication between the advertiser 200 and the customer 102 or a one-to-many communication between the advertiser 200 and many customers 102.
For instance, an advertiser could present the benefits of buying a vacation home to 100 people who have clicked on “Join Seminar” and are in a real-time communication for 10 cents per minute with the advertiser 200. Additionally, the sales seminar could be limited to a certain number of customers. For instance, when the maximum number of 10 customers are in contact with the advertiser, the seminar is turned “off” to further customers and the “Join Seminar” button no longer appears. Finally, extra rewards could be offered for input from the customers. For instance, if a customer tells a story about what his ideal vacation home would be like, he or she might receive an additional dollar or an increased per-minute reward.
In a further embodiment, the advertiser 200 can choose to uninvite a customer 102 from a seminar in progress. For instance, if the advertiser feels that one of the customers is not interested or is collecting money without offering satisfactory input, the advertiser could use the system's control interface to select a customer and remove him or her from the seminar, thereby halting the monetary reward to that customer. Likewise, the customer can move from one seminar to the next. The customer could “shop” one advertiser after the other, hearing a variety of advertising messages and collecting many different rewards for doing so.
In a further embodiment, the customer 102 could not only use the system to hear the sales seminar, but he or she could also buy the product through the system 100. For instance, after listening to the advertiser 200 describe a set of encyclopedias via the telephone 104 for 25 cents per minute, the customer 102 could press “9” on the telephone's touch-tone keypad, which would trigger a purchase. The price of the encyclopedias would be automatically deducted from the customer's balance, and the encyclopedias would be sent to the customer 102. In such a case, the price the customer 102 paid could be deducted from the rewards the customer 102 had earned thus far from taking part in the seminar. As the customer accrues rewards by attending seminars, and, when the customer has accrued a significant amount, such as $25, the system 100 would issue his or her check in the mail. Otherwise, the customer accrues rewards by attending seminars, and the rewards are automatically transferred in the form of digital cash from the advertiser to the customer as the seminar is in progress.
Referring now to
Operation
Referring now to
As described above, the communications link between the user 102 and the advertiser includes live interaction via the user communication device 104 and the advertiser communication device 202 or via the user computer 120 and the advertiser computer 204. The user communication device 104, as well as the advertiser communication device 202, include but are not limited to land-line telephones, wireless cellular telephones, satellite telephones or the like, which communicate over the communications network 110. Communication via the user computer 120 and the advertiser computer 202 include real-time communication, including but not limited to voice over-IP or video over-IP, or the like. However, those skilled in the art will appreciate that other means of communication, such as non-real-time communication, required for filling out public opinion polls, or for providing recorded advertisements, are included within the scope of the invention. At step 760, the system 100 compensates the user 102 based on various input provided to the advertiser 200 during interaction therebetween. The compensation may come in the form of a time-based fee paid to the user 102 or a flat fee paid by the advertiser 200.
Referring now to
Referring now to
Referring now to
Finally,
Application of the Invention
Cindy is a marketer for a company that sells vacation homes. She does most of her business selling not entire vacation homes, but rather selling time-shares. In other words, her clients buy the right to stay in a vacation home for certain periods of time during the year. Other clients buy the right to stay in the same vacation home for different periods of time during the year. Because she has a variety of vacation homes to offer and each one can possibly be time-shared among many different clients, Cindy needs to have a thorough dialogue with her customers. She needs to thoroughly understand their desires: in what location they would like to have a vacation home, what kind of house should it be, would they be willing to share it with other customers in a time-share arrangement, and during which time periods of the year would they want to do so.
Because Cindy needs to have a thorough interactive dialogue with her potential customers, she uses the proposed system to interact with her customers and reward them for hearing her sales pitch. At the online marketplace of the proposed system, Cindy has created a seminar title: “Looking to buy a vacation home? Discuss the possibilities here!” She has also specified a fee of 25 cents per minute that rewards potential customers for listening to her sales pitch. She is also offering an additional $2 reward for potential customers who are willing to reveal their credit history during the session. In order to pay these rewards, Cindy enters her credit card number at the web site of the proposed system so she can be charged for the time that potential clients speak with her. Because Cindy needs to speak in depth with each potential customer, she limits this seminar to one potential customer at a time.
Whenever Cindy is ready to interact with potential customers, she uses the control interface of the proposed system to turn her seminar “on.” At the online marketplace of the proposed system, this makes a “Join Seminar” button appear next to her seminar title, welcoming potential customers to talk to her.
Roger is a frequent traveler who enjoys vacation trips. Having gone on several trips and travel cruises, he receives an enormous amount of promotional material in the mail and many unsolicited telemarketing phone calls. Roger, however, is not willing to spend his free time listening to the sales pitches of travel companies. Instead, he believes that advertisers should pay him for his time when they pitch him their offers. He therefore does much of his shopping at the web site of the proposed system. There, he can examine a large array of offers that advertisers are willing to pay him to see. There are paid seminars on exercise equipment, paid seminars on cookware, even paid seminars that require a special invitation to take part in.
Since he is interested in vacationing, Roger goes to the area of the web site that deals with vacations. There, he sees the titles of many seminars that he can join at the present time. Next to each title, he can see the per-minute reward that he would receive if he takes part in the seminar. He sees a seminar that interests him: “Looking to buy a vacation home? Discuss the possibilities here!” He reads a brief text description of the vacation homes that will be discussed in the seminar. Next to the description is the per-minute reward: the advertiser (Cindy) is offering him a reward of 25 cents per minute to take part in the seminar.
Since he would like to take part in the seminar, Roger presses the “Join Seminar” button. The web site then asks him for his telephone number so that he can join the seminar. After he enters it, the proposed system calls him on the telephone. The proposed system then calls the advertiser of this seminar, Cindy, on the telephone. The two parties are then conferenced together. They are informed that Roger will receive 20 cents per minute from Cindy for the duration of this call.
Roger and Cindy speak in depth about vacation homes. Cindy asks him all about his vacationing needs, and Roger explains his likes and dislikes, as well as his price range. With this information in mind, Cindy describes a time-share arrangement in which Roger could pay a relatively small amount to enjoy a vacation home for one week in Florida. This sounds like a good option to Roger.
Cindy feels that she is close to a sale with Roger, but would feel better if she would know his credit history. She therefore tells him that she is offering a $2 reward if he reveals his credit history to her. Roger does so, providing the necessary information, and Cindy presses the number “5” on her telephone keypad, which instructs the proposed system to transfer an additional $2 re ward from her account into Roger's.
Cindy is satisfied with her customer Roger, and Roger would like to purchase the one-week time-share that she had recommended. He therefore presses the number “9” on his telephone keypad, which instructs the proposed system that he would like to initiate a purchase. As a supplemental feature, the proposed system then uses a series of telephony prompts to lead Roger through the steps of a purchase. Cindy and Roger then hang up their telephones. They talked for a total of twenty minutes.
The proposed system then automatically does the accounting for what occurred. Since Cindy and Roger talked for twenty minutes, Roger earned a reward of 20 minutes multiplied times 25 cents per minute, which equals $5. The proposed system transfers $5 from Cindy's account to Roger's, minus a 10% fee that is collected by the system. The proposed system also transfers the extra $2 from Cindy's account to Roger's to compensate him for revealing his credit history. As a supplemental feature, the proposed system also transfers the price of Roger's purchase from his account into Cindy's.
After this interaction, Roger continues to “shop” different seminars and earn money for doing so. Some of them are one-to-one seminars, such as Cindy's. Others are one-to-many, where Roger is one of many customers listening to a sales pitch. Some seminars are for invitees only. After Roger attends many seminars, he accrues $40 in his account at the proposed system. At the end of the month, the proposed system sends him a check in the mail.
Alternate Embodiments
The foregoing description, for purposes of explanation, used specific nomenclature to provide a thorough understanding of the invention. However, it will be apparent to one skilled in the art that the specific details are not required in order to practice the invention. In other instances, well known components and devices are shown in block diagram form in order to avoid unnecessary distraction from the underlying invention. Thus, the foregoing descriptions of specific embodiments of the present invention are presented for purposes of illustration and description. They are not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the invention to the precise forms disclosed, obviously many modifications and variations are possible in view of the above teachings. The embodiments were chosen and described in order to best explain the principles of the invention and its practical applications, to thereby enable others skilled in the art to best utilize the invention and various embodiments with various modifications as are suited to the particular use contemplated. It is intended that the scope of the invention be defined by the following claims and their equivalents.
Further, the method and system described hereinabove is amenable for execution on various types of executable mediums other than a memory device such as a random access memory. Other types of executable mediums can be used, such as but not limited to, a computer readable storage medium which can be any memory device, compact disc, or floppy disk.
Although the present invention has been described with reference to an incentive-based interactive advertisement system, it is not limited to providing advertisements over the Internet. The present invention can be used for other electronic commerce purposes, other commodities, other types of provider, and other types of services not explicitly listed. In addition, voice and video transmission mediums within the contemplation of the present invention include systems for wireless communications or any network capable of transmitting voice data, voice and video-over-IP, or the like. Moreover, performance, by a human operator, of the interactive voice recognition procedures of the present invention is within the contemplation of the present invention.
Advantages of the invention include providing users with the capability to engage in a compensation-based interactive exchange with a provider of a selected advertisement via a real-time communications link. Contrary to current practice, users of the current system are compensated for interacting with advertisers and engaging in seminars. Consequently, users are compensated and advertisers receive a constant flow of customers for their advertisement in which a user/customer can purchase the product contained in the advertisement.
Having disclosed exemplary embodiments, and the best mode, modifications and variations may be made to the disclosed embodiments while remaining within the scope of the invention as defined by the following claims.
The present application is a Continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/808,475, filed Mar. 13, 2001 now abandoned entitled “AN APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR RECRUITING, COMMUNICATING WITH, AND PAYING PARTICIPANTS OF INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING,” all of which are incorporated herein by reference.
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| Parent | 09808475 | Mar 2001 | US |
| Child | 10956571 | US |
