A story published in the most recent edition of Speech Technology Magazine looks at a variety of ways that companies are integrating voice solutions into their outbound marketing campaigns.  One way is through making voice a component of a larger multimedia campaign like we've discussed in the past.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Another early example of this kind of multimodal marketing was on display last year in a campaign by European carmaker Opel, a subsidiary of General Motors. Opel, looking to herald the launch of a new convertible, emailed 80,000 addresses in its database, asking recipients to supply their phone numbers. In exchange, Opel promised to enter them into a sweepstakes, and not to share the phone numbers with anyone. 

Interest was surprisingly high: 16,000 people sent in their phone numbers, and were greeted with a second email providing a link to a Web site. Once there, consumers viewed a comedic three-minute movie, personalized with their names in one scene. Moments later, when a character in the film is seen dialing a phone, the consumer’s own phone rang, with a 30- second message from the character inviting the consumer to test drive the new car. The innovative combination of media snowballed into a viral mania, with recipients providing email addresses and phone numbers for their friends so they, too, could get “called” by the Web movie.

In just a few weeks, the campaign generated 450,000 calls. This, says Elisabeth Jane Bertrand, a Belgian interactive marketing consultant who worked on the project for eStara, a division of e-commerce solutions provider ATG, “is a typical example of how cross-media integration works. This was a bilateral approach, using two media channels.” Because of the personalized component, she says, “you see a much higher level of consumer engagement with the brand.”