Jaix is not your traditional marketing company. As well as using the mobile phone to promote companies’ products, it rewards its subscribers with two ”jollars” – short for Jaix dollars and the equivalent of USD 0.40 – for every offer it sends out. People can use these jollars to buy products at Jaix’s internet shop. The shop originally offered such items as games and music, but has now been expanded to include carbon dioxide emission rights.

Eric Larsson, founder and vice president of Jaix, says: “Our business philosophy is to give something back to our subscribers, and when we saw that a lot of people wanted to do something about global warming, but didn’t really know how to, we thought we could give them jollars to buy carbon dioxide emission rights.

“If our subscribers want to spend their jollars on emission rights, we collect them into a 'pot' because we cannot buy USD 0.40 worth of discharge rights. When we have saved about USD 1600, we go and buy the rights from Miljöbörsen, a Swedish site for buying and selling emission rights.”

Larsson says USD 1600 of emission rights represents 40 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is the equivalent of how much is discharged in a 200,000km car journey.

“Every third year, there is a pot of emission rights made available for sale to companies that discharge carbon dioxide,” Larsson says. “But with us buying them, there will be fewer rights out there on the market, which will hopefully force these companies to rethink their business practices.”

Jaix was launched in April and has been well received by the public. “We have been online for eight months and with no marketing at all, we have more than 2500 subscribers,” Larsson says. “Of these, only about 40 have unsubscribed to our service.”

Larsson says that because the service is free and subscribers get offers they can use to buy products, they get new members every day. “We don’t send out generic ads to encourage people to come and buy things,” he says. “We send out good offers for products that people usually want to buy, and that’s a big difference.”

Signing up to receive promotional offers from Jaix is easy. All you have to do is go to the site, www.jaix.se, and fill in a form with your personal details, such as your age, interests and address. You will then start receiving text messages with promotional offers that fit your profile. The number of offers you will normally receive per week is three – a number that Larsson believes is “not that annoying.”

“To my knowledge, we are the only ones offering this kind of service,” he says. “I know of one other company that offers free mobile games if you sign up to its ads, but Jaix is much bigger in that everybody should find something in our internet shop that they really like and want.”

Jaix earns its keep from the companies that advertise through its service. “If you want to advertise on TV, it will most likely take a few weeks from idea to execution,” Larsson says. “But if you advertise with Jaix, it only takes 10 minutes. All a company has to do is log on to our website, write the promotional text it wants subscribers to see and send it to its target group.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen
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