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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA mobile-phone service launched last spring by Carmel-based company ChaCha Search Inc., the human-assisted Internet search engine, has scored a large corporate advertiser.
Kansas City, Mo.-based H&R Block Inc. has launched a mobile advertising campaign using ChaCha’s mobile-phone service as the outlet. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
H&R Block is running the campaign during tax season and is linking advertisements for its free online tax prep service with answers that ChaCha provides to tax-related queries it receives.
Users submitting questions to ChaCha’s mobile-phone service receive free responses from “guides” via text message – until they hit the limit of 20-guide-researched answers per month. The service responds to millions of queries per month.
The amount of tax-related questions ChaCha responded to last year jumped nearly 25 percent from the previous year’s level, making it an attractive option for H&R Block, the company said in a written statement.
For its part, ChaCha is honored to be a part of H&R Block’s first “short message service” mobile campaign, company co-founder and CEO Scott Jones said in the statement.
Human guides are central to ChaCha’s business, but the company never has expected them to respond to every question. ChaCha stores all its answers in an ever-growing database. So when a new user repeats a previous query, ChaCha can send back the guide’s original reply.
Ultimately, the company aims to reach a critical mass, when the vast majority of its answers are automated.
Since its inception in 2006, ChaCha has raised $16 million from heavyweight investors such as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Compaq founder Rod Canion.
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