Anyone who doesn’t think that advertising isn’t the backbone of our Internet age is only fooling themselves. Anyone involved with providing services at some point looks to advertising to add to their bottom line; and companies like Tegit Marketing are in the business of enabling companies like your local telco to take advantage of ad dollars.
Using their T9 Nav technology Tegit Marketing provides local telcos with the ability to leverage the power of keywords by linking keywords to a specific URL. So let’s say you type in; on the idle screen of your phone, the word ‘donuts’ which you local telco can then sell the URL associated with that keyword to Tim Horton’s (a Canadian donut/coffee shop).
The thing is that in this kind of scenario there is no way around being shown that telco provided ‘default’ search result, other than launch your mobile browser and using your search engine of choice. By defining a cloud of keywords and then selling them to anyone wanting to buy them your telco has effectively locked you into a passive advertising situation.
I think that when the services launches in late 2009 you will see a lot of the telcos looking very seriously at it as a way to increase their profits even further – at our expense.
[hat tip to Blog Herald]
