Ingenio Brings PPCall to Podcasting

In what appears to be a first, Ingenio is going to distribute its PPCall advertisers to podcasts via Podbridge, a company that inserts ads into podcasts. Think of podcasting as on-demand radio, which includes traditional, mainstream and amateur/user-generated content. Podbridge's content distribution includes some high-profile broadcasters such as BBC radio.

The Podbridge system offers both demographic and geographic targeting by soliciting some basic information from users when they sign up/install a required iTunes plug-in. Users don't search for ads, as with other partners in the Ingenio PPCall network. It's much more of a "contextual" play, but the targeting promises to be fairly precise based on the geographic and demographic information.

The other issue here is the creative — these are not text ads. But Ingenio has been doing audio creative on behalf selected advertisers it distributes through Jingle Networks' 1800-Free-411 directory assistance service, which it reports generate strong "call throughs."

If this program proves to be a success — and assuming Google implements the dMarc acquisition and brings AdWords to radio — expect performance-based marketing to extend to radio. Certainly Ingenio is already thinking about how to extend this. But I was told by the company that this is still something of a trial to see how PPCall ads play in what is essentially a radio environment.

Another important thing to remember here is that this is "offline" advertising (mobile too in a sense), though still digital and tied to the Internet.

Here's more from ClickZ and MediaPost (reg. req'd).

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TechCrunch covers TalkShoe (a pun as in "really big shoe"): a simple platform for the creation of user-generated podcast "talkshows" with ad insertion. Very interesting.

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