21 Nov, 2007
AT&T announced that it is acquiring online ad company Ingenio for an undisclosed sum in a deal set to close in early 2008. AT&T’s strategy, not necessarily an attempt to go head to head with the likes of online ad-ogre Google, is rather to bolster the virtual content of its online directory assistance and information website yellowpages.com.
The privately held company founded in 1999 specialises in advertising platforms featuring so called “live-search commerce.” What that techno-marketing-babble means is that Ingenio places ads online, on web enabled mobile search pages and podcasts like Google for example, but unlike Google only charges advertisers a fee for customers that actually call the advertised phone number and speak to a “live” company agent about a product; this service is dubbed by the company “Pay Per Call.”
According to Ingenio, this technique is accomplished with its proprietary technology designed to “provision unique published phone numbers to track calls to businesses generated by those ads, and advertisers' fees are based on the volume of these leads.”
"Throughout the past few years, we've built and deployed innovative products that help the services economy flourish online," said Mark Britto, president and CEO of Ingenio. "What we've lacked, however, is scale - the ability to bring those solutions to the market in the biggest possible way. Our merger with AT&T allows us to bring our innovations to more businesses nationwide.""As advertisers add performance-based advertising to their marketing mix, this investment makes sense for our business," said Ray Wilkins, AT&T group president-Diversified Business. "Ingenio's technology will allow AT&T to expand our robust service portfolio for print, online and mobile advertisers, and that will further differentiate us from our competitors."AT&T plans to retain Ingenio's management team.
