Pumped For Pay Per Call: Ingenuity At Ingenio

I had an interesting conversation with Marc Barach, Chief Marketing Officer of San Francisco based Ingenio. Ingenio's business is pay per call: a subject I'd heard of, but not something I had any kind of real understanding of. I know a little more about it now though and it's actually quite slick. Editor's Note: The next frontier in the "Pay Per" format of advertising is "Pay Per Call." Stop in at WebProWorld's TrueLocal for example, that are trying to reach out to these untapped masses and facilitate their entry into online marketing by simplifying the process and requiring little more than the business fill out a form and create a profile. Pay per call however, is a whole other ballgame. Pay per call uses the phone, something almost every business holds near and dear to their bottom line and have been using for years. With Ingenio's pay per call program, businesses are able to bid on results and have their phone number display in the listing. For the advertiser, the process is very similar to placing themselves in a traditional yellow page style phone book directory, so there is a certain level of familiarity to the concept even among the least tech savvy of advertisers. Once the advertiser is listed, they are able to choose options like having their listing display only during business hours. That helps to insure the advertisers are able to take full advantage of their results and maximize their program's effectiveness. Like Google and other ppc programs, advertisers are able to also able to taste test the concept with very modest investments. Given the cost of traditional paper book phone directory advertising, I would think this concept would be extremely attractive. It will be very interesting to me to see how this technology develops over the course of the next few years. Will traditional telecoms move to develop their own programs entirely or will they look to partner with companies like Ingenio? Ingenio has distribution arrangements already with AOL Search, AOL Yellow Pages and announced just today a