Advertising's Evolution to Adapt to People's New Technology Driven Behaviors

“EBay Gambles on Google Partnership for Success of Skype, the Internet Phone Service”

I ran across this headline today in my NY Times Technology RSS feed and thought I should post about it in my blog because, as future librarians, we already know (and love?) Google, hasn't eBay been around forever?, and my fellow Intro to Tech students are getting to know (and love?) Skype.

EBay is hoping its new partnership with Google will help it find new ways to make money from Skype, its Internet calling service. But experts wonder if enough people are willing to make the switch from traditional phones to talking through their computers.

The main issue at play seems to be that people prefer to use landline telephone systems and “that only 10 to 15 percent of people choose to talk using their computers, and that this proportion is not increasing.”

I just don’t understand the insistence of a landline, since I haven’t had one for years. I’ve long ago switched to a cell phone; an added bonus was to stop the telemarketing calls. Now that I’ve learned how Skype works, I plan to share this technology with my parents and friends who all live out of state, so we can make calls for free (or after the cost of a set of headphones, anyway.) I really think it's only a matter of time for people to become more comfortable with PC based calling, and the landline will go the way of the Dodo bird.

Anyway, the gimmick is for this partnership is to increase company profits through increasing advertising dollars. To do this, Google will provide a feature to

allow users to talk to advertisers by way of Skype, instead of just clicking through to the advertisers’ Web sites. Users of this feature, called click-to-call, would also have the option of using Google’s own Google Talk system or standard telephones.

Apparently eBay is also experimenting with Skype by including it in their online auctions, the “Skpe Me” feature so that buys can talk directly to sellers. Ironically, eBay also plans on increasing their advertising revenue by branching out to feature Yahoo ads featuring products that auction sellers are competing to sell.

This leads me to the other interesting and related article I also found in the NY Times Technology RSS feed: “In a TiVo World, Television Turns Marketing Efforts to New Media”.

Basically, advertisers are waking up to the fact that traditional outlets for commercial spots are being bypassed by current technologies and that they need to develop new marketing strategies adopted to people’s new technologically driven behaviors.

It took us more than six months to get our TiVo hooked up because we didn’t have a landline. I wonder if TiVo would consider a “Skype Me” option for setting up their service, instead of making customers go through the hassle and expensive of setting up a landline service. It’s probably only a matter of time.