AT&T Buys Ingenio

From the release:

AT&T Inc. announced today that an AT&T subsidiary has agreed to acquire privately held Ingenio, a leading provider of Pay Per Call technology. The transaction is expected to close in early January 2008.

AT&T plans to integrate Ingenio’s Pay Per Call solutions into its directory service and local search advertising portfolio, including the YELLOWPAGES.COM Network, AT&T Real Yellow Pages and 1-800-Yellow Pages. Ingenio’s Pay Per Call service is an advertising platform that allows businesses to manage their ad programs and generate valuable phone leads. The platform uses proprietary technology 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.

Pay Per Call technology will provide another lead generation tool for advertisers to reach customers. Integrating Ingenio’s Pay Per Call technology will enable AT&T to take advantage of a growing trend toward performance-based advertising. The move also demonstrates AT&T’s commitment to providing advertisers with comprehensive solutions, the addition of Ingenio’s Pay Per Call technology will give advertisers the flexibility to purchase leads in a consistent manner across online, mobile or print media whether or not they have a Web site.

AT&T had an existing relationship with Ingenio. Recently, Marchex acquired VoiceStar.

One question I need to answer is whether the whole business got bought or just the Ingenio “side” of it. The price might be quite different accordingly. It appears from the release that AT&T is buying the company as a technology platform and not as an ad network.

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