Turkish operator Turkcell is seeing some success with its Tone & Win platform, which lets users sign up to a program and choose an ad for people calling them to hear, then being rewarded with airtime. The program launched in May 2008 in restricted beta form but is now available to all subscribers, and has signed up more than 200,000 members—a significant number but a fraction of the 34.8 million people who subscribe to Turkcell. The program now creates “more than six million monthly impressions” and apparently includes message-based advertising as well, “giving free text and minutes in return for sending sms/mms ads daily”. The average Tone & Win subscriber gets about 20 minutes free talk a month, but it can be double that for people who have higher-than-average incoming call rates…or who take longer than average to pick up the phone, considering the airtime won is based on the amount of time the callers listen to the ringback tone ads, reports TEM.

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Turkcell is also pleased that people who join the program have a lower churn rate than other Turkcell customers. Advertisers get some detailed information of who listens to the ad, incuding exclusive brand reports based on caller demographics, socioeconomic status, total impressions and the total branded RBT (NYSE: BT) seconds listened to. Big names have signed up.

So it´s a win-win-win situation, unless you count the people making the calls and hearing the ads as losing out in this scenario…especially if people take longer than normal to pick up the phone so the caller can hear just how much life Coke adds.