Watch Commercials, Get Airline Miles

Getting consumers to interact with ads seems to be the bane of marketers these days, if you listen to all the hubbbub printed in the news. A new website, E-miles, is hoping to get consumers to engage themselves with ads through a rewards system of airline miles. Four airlines have signed on for the launch: Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, U.S. Airways and Northwest Airlines.

According to E-miles executives, the new E-miles site would feature a variety of advertising messages, ranging from print ads to commercials and other specially-developed messages. After registering and signing on, site users would be required to select the advertising messages they want to watch, then do so and answer three simple questions related to the commercial message they have just seen. Sample questions were of the simple "yes" or "no" variety.

E-Miles members would subsequently receive between 10 and 30 miles per minute they spend with one or more commercial message and follow-up questions on the site. There will be no cap on the number of miles E-Miles participants get in a given year.

The site will go live in January and already has advertisers such as Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Hilton Hotels, Zales, Visit Florida and LendingTree onboard. The idea of rewarding consumers for watching ads isn't new, and only time will tell if it will work.