Gareth Jones

Now that Learnalot is offering an ad-supported subscription, I decided it would be a good idea to call around some media and advertising companies to find more ads for the site. Bearing in mind the demographic it’s not as easy as you might expect to find appropriate ads. Anyway, so far I’ve spoken to around 20 different companies and look forward to working with a few of them.

I’ve just called a company called Azam Marketing which has left me distinctly unimpressed.

The guy who answered the phone answered with a confused “hello?” and not the usual formal greeting so at first I wasn’t even sure that I had gotten through to the right place.

Me: Is this Azam Marketing?

Him: Yes.

Me: Ok, good. Are you involved in media buying at all?

Him: Yes.

Me: Excellent. My name is Gareth Jones and I’m calling from a company called Learnalot. I was wondering if you’d be interested in working with us on our ad-supported subscription on an educational portal that is aimed at 11-16 year olds.

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I wasn’t sure what just happened. Did the guy hang up on me? Was there something wrong with my phone? Was there something wrong with his phone? I called him again.

Him: Hello?

Me: Oh hi. What happened there?

Him: Stop ******* calling here or I will ******* report you and write about you all over the internet, you ******* ****!

Me: Whoa, what the hell is this? Who are you?

Him: I mean it stop ******* calling here trying to sell me your ******* advertising.

At this point I hung up, not really sure if I had just imagined the last 5 minutes. I checked the number on the site against the number I had just called – they were the same. I then replayed the conversation in my head and noted that I had asked if this was Azam Marketing before he confirmed that it was. There had been no mistake here – so what was this guy’s problem?

This guy lists clients such as BMI, BT, ITV, Disney and Hilton on his website, but I seriously doubt any of those companies even know who he is.

Today’s learners are bombarded with all kinds of high quality digital entertainment; including big-screen movies at the cinema, high-definition video games on their plasmas at home and big-budget mobile video games when they’re on the move. As the quality and the availability of this entertainment increases, learners are expecting other forms of media to keep up and are looking for higher quality resources from which to learn; resources that can satisfy their appetite for impressive audio-visuals while still retaining relevant content.

Most elearning aimed at maths students is dry, static, stale and boring. Other resources succeed in being a little more creative with their ideas, but sadly fall short when it comes to their execution. This is sometimes because they have been developed by maths teachers who know how to do maths, but don’t know how to create engaging software with high production values despite their best efforts and intentions.

Learnalot is an exciting educational portal that fuses the subject knowledge of teachers with top-end software to create case study problems that truly engage and challenge its learners. Each case study is different but they all provide pupils, teachers and parents with problems that are fun to use whilst also being a rich learning experience.

Although we are currently focussed on developing a full suite of Mathematics resources for KS3, we eventually plan to cater for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 as well as GCSE across a number of other subjects and will be making frequent additions to the list of available resources.

Our case studies will be available to educational institutions on an annual subscription basis.

The portal itself is currently in development, as is our first resource, and we aim to have between five and ten resources ready for the launch of the portal early next year.