The Cole Papers, Audiotext, September 1995

The ringy-dingy of audiotext is not phones, it's cash registers

ATLANTA -- Between the heaven of a healthy bottom line and the hell of newsprint price increases lies the purgatory of the profit center, wherein publishers, ad directors, promotion people and yes, even newsroom folk, toil.

Some profit centers -- classified, display, circulation -- are righteous, upstanding, morally correct.

Some can make you twitch.

Like audiotext.

Audiotext has been around a few years, starting in the early '80s as an add-on, providing sports scores, recipes, weather and movie reviews on a "public service" basis.

From there, it grew to include selling audiotext advertising, and the revenue faucet opened a little, especially for those "homework" lines you can call to see if your kid's lying about his teachers' assignments.

Then came personal classified audiotext.

The revenue stream turned into a river.

The industry said, "Mercy."

"This is huge," said Chris Schott of Bureau One, a big service bureau in Longview, Wash. "MCI has 8000 lines just for personals."

Bureau One says its smaller clients generate a few thousand dollars a month, while the take on the metro level stretches into several hundred thousand dollars a month.

Obviously, the money from personal classifieds could buy several of those beaches all men tell all women they love to walk along. And the cash flow is serious enough to expand the market, which means more suppliers selling more and varied services.

There are regular personals (boy meets girl), Christian personals (nice boy meets nice girl), gay personals (boy meets boy; girl meets girl) and even audiotext methods to put together buyers and sellers of autos and farm equipment (Farmer John meets John Deere).

But as we worked the NEXPO '95 aisles, we connected with a few interesting companies working the personals in new ways, or skipping them altogether.

Low-tech, high support
Sit down for a chat with Harry Stewart of Stauffer Media Systems, and you'll find you're eyeball-to-eyeball with the guy who wrote the program. Where else at NEXPO could you do that?

Stewart wrote the no-frills, PC-based program now in use at 43 smaller dailies, then sold it to Stauffer, of Blue Springs, Mo. His chief drawing cards are ease of use and support.

He's so sincere about support that he had to interrupt our conversation in Stauffer's NEXPO booth to help a paper whose audiotext feed from the Associated Press wasn't coming in properly.

If he can't talk his way through it, Stewart also can dial up each system and do about 95 percent of the troubleshooting over the phone link from his computer to the site.

"We normally sell to papers in the 16,000-25,000 circulation range, and they don't have the money to hire a programmer to take care of their audiotext program," Stewart said. "So by making it easy to use, I help them get to the break-even point quicker."

He's similarly honest about the money-making capacity of these systems at the lower end:

"I don't sell this thing as a cash cow," Stewart said. "It'll pay for itself and make a little money."

But the main things it'll do, Stewart said, are:

Protect your market from other audiotext services;

Provide a bridge from ink-on-paper toward an eventual on-line presence;

Promote your paper as the primary source of information in your area.

The cost? For a small, eight-line operation, including depreciation of the $14,000 in equipment, Stauffer estimates $1700 a month. The company guesses you could pull in $3275 a month out of ads for various audiotext services, leaving a net of $1575.

Remember that these figures are from sales and marketing people, so let's all repeat The Cole Papers' mantra: Your mileage may vary.

Once the audiotext service is in, it's just a short step to fax on demand. In Stauffer's case, it's a $1500 step. Then you can fax recipes, speeches, scores, classified ads and what-have-you to readers who order them over the phone.

High-tech, kitchen sink
Gannett Media Technologies International Inc. of Cincinnati and the Associated Press have teamed for an innovative, interactive audiotext service called PI (Personal Information).

Personal it is: You're given a card with an identification code which identifies you to the newspaper's all-seeing, all-knowing Windows computer system. Meantime, the PI folks are constantly updating news, weather, stocks -- more than 12,000 categories of information for the database.

The updates (available as text, fax or audio sound bites) are sent out by Lotus Notes to each server.

The customer picks which news, weather, sports, stocks, etc., she wants to get, and programs the server to fetch them on demand, or call or fax them to her at a prearranged time.

Unlike other systems, you get your mix, and you don't have to navigate endless audiotext menus to get what you want. Of course, the database keeps track of your preferences, and advertisers can narrowcast ads with extreme accuracy, based on that information.

This could put you in rarefied air: Because of the stock prices you asked for and the sports information you ordered up, you're the only one on the block who got that Porsche ad.

To put a more sinister spin on it, it's equally possible just to sell your name to the local Porsche dealer and skip the ad entirely.

Did you cancel your newspaper subscription?

Circulation's computer can tell PI's computer that you've ducked out, and they'll gang up on you with a heartfelt plea to resubscribe from the one person you can't say no to: the automotive editor.

Market scheming aside, PI amounts to an interesting experiment in interactive media. We all say we want newspapers tailored to the individual, but do we want to be called at the office each day at 8:30 a.m. to get it over the phone? Do we want it over the phone at all, or do we want fax?

Or do we want any of this enough to pay for it, either as an advertiser or a subscriber? After all, a great deal of what PI provides can be had by switching from Headline News to the Weather Channel, and maybe listening to the car radio on the way to work.

Interactive it's not, but you don't have to read yet another fax, or put your phone in your ear to have radio announcers deliver the news.

Be kind to your web-footed friends
You knew audiotext would hit the World-Wide Web, didn't you? And it had to be personals, didn't it?

MicroVoice, a Minneapolis-based service bureau and supplier that also provides such innovations as an audiotext loan-payment calculator that can be tied into a mortgage rate service, has moved its personals to the web at http://www.mva.com

There, you can click on stickpins on a United States map and read the personals from that paper. The MicroVoice product, called InterPersonals, then displays a form where you can detail the person you're looking for.

Obviously, regional preferences are taken into account: In Minnesota, the categories are "looking for men" and "looking for women"; in Alameda, Calif., just outside San Francisco, the choices are expanded to "men looking for men" and "women looking for women."

Whatever they are, your preferences are matched with the database on-line and displayed in a few seconds. (An upcoming feature will be pictures of the owners of the matched ads.)

All the above is free. As you get more serious, so do the MicroVoice clients: Hearing and responding to a phone introduction involves 900-numbers, and that gets into per-minute charges that can exceed $2, according to our sample.

Want to write an ad? You can on InterPersonals. The first 30 words are free; after that, it's $3 per word, which ought to encourage more tight writing than any crusty city editor ever could.

The ads go into the database and into the sponsoring paper. You get your voicemail box number by electronic mail, and from there, the process is identical with the print versions.

The Web personals have a lot of potential: As transmission rates climb (probably with the aid of cable television) and browsers get more functional, we'll see audio, Mpeg video and higher interactivity in every application, and each advance can add value (and therefore profits) to Internet personals.

If the growth in the Web continues, look for audiotext to leap off the printed page entirely and become a total Web medium.

Then, if your cyber-soulmate claims he likes to walk on the beach, you can demand movie footage to prove it.

-- John Bryan

Bureau One Inc.,
(206) 636-2000;
Christian Singles Network,
(800) 348-6384;
Direct Response Marketing,
(716) 633-7535;
Micro Voice Applications Inc.,
(612) 376-9483;
Stauffer Media Systems,
(417) 782-0280.

The ringy-dingy of audiotext is not phones, it's cash registers

From THE COLE PAPERS, September 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.