Voicemail campaign ads: Would you use them?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ^ | November 29, 2007 | Monica Guzman

[2ndDivisionVet]

In the coming months, you'll see campaign ads everywhere: On billboards, bumpers, lawns, Facebook profiles.

But did you ever think you'd hear one on a friend's cell phone?

Did you ever think you'd want to?

A company called YouMail launched a page last week with nine campaign-related voicemail recordings available for free download. Fans of certain candidates can set their greetings so they play to their whole address book or assign them only to a few select contacts.

The idea hasn't yet taken off in any big way; only greetings supporting Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani have been sampled more than 1,000 times. (The company did not release download data.) Still, it represents a novel, if perhaps somewhat disturbing, experiment in tech-enabled friend-to-friend marketing.

"There's no reason we shouldn't adapt our personalized voicemail and messages and just speak our mind," said spokesman Christian Mudgett.

Greetings are available for Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and -- interestingly enough -- Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Candidate fans: Would you put these on your cell phone?

For what it's worth, here's a breakdown of how the candidate voicemail greetings were performing relative to each other as of Tuesday afternoon (Note: The company did not release the number of downloads per candidate.):

1) Hillary Clinton is the most popular candidate, reaching 50 percent more users than her closest competitor, Barack Obama, and 300 percent more than the highest Republican candidate, Giuliani.

2) People who download the Obama greeting are about 3 times more likely to use it as their default greeting (42 percent) as people who download the Clinton greeting (17 percent).

3) In fact, Clinton greeting users are among the least likely to make it their default greeting; 100 percent of those who downloaded Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich greetings made it their default greeting.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Lots of innovations this campaign cycle. Click thru to hear the ads.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Ping!

[supercat]

I'm not quite clear why anyone would use such generic-sounding messages. Why not record, in one's own voice, "Hello, this is Joe. Sorry I'm not here, but if you leave your name and number, and promise to vote for ___, I'll get back to you as soon as possible."

Or perhaps, "Hello, this is Joe. Sorry I can't take your call--I'm too busy helping ___ become the next President of the United States. Please leave your name and message and I'll get back to you."