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MarketingVOX: A new service, set to launch in January, will give customers frequent flier miles in exchange for their watching or reading ads and responding to questions about them.
The service, called e-Miles, has signed up five of the six major airlines, with American Airlines being the sole holdout, reports AdWeek. Users identify their primary frequent flier account and fill out a short profile of their demographic information. Then they are given the option to fill out interest profiles from 13 categories, results from which are used by advertisers to target offers and ads. Users can select which types of ads they do not want to receive. e-Miles already has several advertisers signed up to the service, including LendingTree, Enterprise Rent-a-Car and Hilton Hotels.
e-Miles is the latest attempt by companies to compensate customers for voluntarily exposing themselves to ads. In June, Virgin Mobile launched Sugar Mama, which gives users free airtime for watching web video spots. Former Universal McCann chairman Robin Kent will be launching SpiralFrog, which trades digital music for ad attention.
Mark Drusch, president of e-Miles and a former Delta Air Lines executive, says that e-Miles will work because fliers are already familiar with the concept of frequent-flier miles. "It's building of the simple concept that people want to be rewarded for their time," Drusch is quoted by AdWeek as saying. Someone who spends five minutes viewing and replying to ads each day would earn 250,000 frequent-flier miles in one year, enough for a round-trip ticket.
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