Foneshow, Ando partner on ad-supported mobile radio

By Dan Butcher

May 5, 2009

Foneshow sends out SMS notifications for radio clients

Foneshow and Ando Media LLC have partnered to provide content publishers with an integrated mobile media platform that includes ad-supported mobile radio.

This new platform offers a portal for broadcasters and other content publishers to create and stream targeted brand and sponsor messages and track the influence and reach of their ads. Third-party ad-serving and audience-measurement platform Ando Media's Ad Injector is a tool enabling broadcast media clients to inject and evaluate advertising data for mobile applications in real-time through Web streaming or via Foneshow, a provider of radio on demand for mobile phones.

"Foneshow has been working with the broadcast radio industry for about a year now, and as broadcast radio moves over to its digital future, which it inevitably had to do, they had to have standard ways to understand how many people consume an ad," said Erik Schwartz, cofounder/CEO of Foneshow, Portland, ME.

"Ando has fulfilled that need and become the standard, so it's been a natural fit, and it all fell into place very quickly," he said.

Dial Global, Fox and a lot of the larger radio stations are looking for new digital opportunities, in particular mobile opportunities, and they want to roll up the various platforms -- including mobile -- into one buy, according to Foneshow.

Foneshow metrics

"Ando helps us do that," Mr. Schwartz said.

Foneshow is carrier-agnostic and focused on talk, news and sports programming. Clients include KGO Radio in San Francisco, the Mike Molloy show, Jack Rice, Stephanie Miller, Bill Press and Tom Hartman.

Consumers can sign up on Web site of each partner via a subscriber widget, where they enter their mobile phone number and click ‘subscribe' to receive a text message confirming their opt in.

They then get SMS notifications about new shows, which allow them to access that particular piece of programming. Audio is consumed via voice channel of their mobile phone.

"We're mostly starting off with preroll advertising, and we can put a call-to-action within an audio ad, ‘To buy, press 5 at any time during the show,' and we'll connect the calls," Mr. Schwartz said. "We host CPC-based advertising on the radio, and they've never been able to do that at this point.

"Radio advertising has been unmeasurable, but this allows for a lot of accountability," he said. "We're mostly working with people that are already advertising on the shows, because our partners already have their own stable of advertisers."

Foneshow's technology is available to more than 265 million mobile phones in the U.S. and 3 billion handsets worldwide.

In August 2007, Foneshow closed a series A venture capital round with CEI Community Ventures, Masthead Venture Partners and Small Enterprise Growth Fund of Maine.

Foneshow has built a telephone-based distribution platform for short-form audio, primarily news and talk radio programming.

The platform leverages the cellular telephone network and lets consumers to subscribe to, access, control, publish, share and consume audio programming form virtually any mobile phone.

The system features rapid propagation of programming from the creator to the consumer.

Ando Media is a provider of real-time audience-measurement and ads-management services for the Internet audio market.

"The current state of ad-supported mobile radio is an interesting place, because there are a lot of folks focused on just the iPhone, Pandora has iPhone app, Aircast, but to really help the radio industry, you need something with more mainstream penetration than the iPhone has right now," Mr. Schwartz said.

Foneshow works on any mobile phone that supports text messaging.

"A lot of the others are more focused on creating a new radio industry, whereas we're working with the current industry that's out there, leveraging those people that already have that skill set in place," Mr. Schwartz said. "We focus on news, talk and sports -- the whole music side we're not really worried about.

"People still like audio programming, but as far as consumers' expectations about how media can be consumed, they're wanting in on demand in smaller bites, rather than long form, and mobile is ideal for that," he said. "It fits in well with the way consumers are looking to consume media these days."