Too often, we seek success using complexity. Today, ifByPhone hits it out of the park with a simple and brilliant voice mashup solution: the ability to integrate direct-response call data with Web-based advertising available using Google Analytics, making it possible to gauge the overall effectiveness of a lead-generation campaign.  Simply put,  from a single view, you can judge the effectiveness of a mixed web and traditional advertising based campaign using Google analytics.  The secret sauce? By using pre-determined phone numbers on advertising, you can track which ad generated the call, allowing the company to optimize their overall marketing campaigns.  ifByPhone allows a company to easily track when a call is made from one of it’s numbers, powering the capability.  It’s simple. It’s brilliant.  And, as I paraphrase Ice Cube, will make ifByPhone so much cheese they’ll have to weigh it.

Where’s money? Here’s the money: less than ten percent of advertising budgets are spent online, and mostly with paid-search. Paid search makes a lot of business sense, and is intrinsically more valuable than other forms of advertising because paid-search advertising deals with self-qualified leads.  People who type in “Toyota Corolla” are probably looking to buy a car.  Random people sitting on a couch watching the “Toyota-thon” commercials tend not to be looking for cars.  Even more so, the people who purchase the automobile advertising are assured that their money is doing something: you can measure online succes by simply counting mouse clicks.  It’s really difficult to measure the response from traditional media outlets, until now.  With a voice mashup approach like ifByPhone’s, you can seriously increase the visibility into the effectiveness of traditional media advertising… where 90% of the market still is, and will be for some time to come.  This ability to easily measure advertising effectiveness is valuable to everybody in the value chain.

And, as I am a one note guy these days, notice that the application has nothing (nothing) do with voice.  The application is advertising, but ifByPhone made it better with voice.  Congratulations, gentlemen. You rock.