I came across this today, and being in marketing, this is REALLY cool to me.  Here’s a great example of new and old medias coming together to create a great marketing campaign.  General Motors/Opel (European car maker) was releasing a new car at the end of last year and wanted to create some viral buzz about their now Astra TwinTop convertible.  They thought about an email campain, they thought about a viral video campaign, they thought about an IVR-based marketing campaign… then decided to combine all of these into one mega campaign.  Read the full details here >>

In a nutshell, they emailed their database of 80,000 customers to give them the option to opt in to a new and exciting promotion they were running.  Customers were asked to provide a few key pieces of information in their response, including their cell phone or desk phone number.  Within a few minutes of responding to that opt in email, the customer was sent another email with a link to a 1-minute funny video related to the new convertible.  And while watching the video, a phone call was placed to their number and the voice of the main character from the video started talking to them and asking them questions, individualized with their name, over the phone!  If the customer didn’t pick up the phone, a similar message was left for them.

Combine this with the viral effect of asking that customer to forward the email along to friends, complete with friends’ email addresses, names and phone numbers, and Opel’s response to the campaign was phenomenal.  They placed 454,000 outbound marketing calls from the video, had more than 2 million web visitors, and added more than 12,000 new names to their marketing database.

What a new and unique use of IVR in marketing, that delighted both customers and Opel with the response.  If you think about it, there are hundreds of ways to use IVR in marketing — that don’t involve interrupting dinner with telemarketing calls!  This is just one more unique use of IVR technology!