At the Interactive Local Media: 07 conference that we are holding in Los Angeles, we got Yellowpages.com President Charles Stubbs to drop in as an unannounced speaker to talk about the InGenio purchase. Speculation puts the size of the InGenio purchase, which should close in early 2008, at being anywhere from $75 million to $200 million. I suspect it is closer to the higher number.
InGenio is a leading player in the pay per call space that allows businesses to bid on directory assistance lead generation. Typical categories are $5-12 per call, with certain specialized areas priced considerably higher.
“It gives us a chance to get back lost advertisers,” says Stubbs. “It puts the lead into the value equation.
Stubbs says that the addition of pay per call to AT&T (and Yellowpages.com’s) arsenal will be symbiotic, allowing AT&T to funnel its hundreds of thousands of advertisers into the pay per call arena. “It allows us to leverage the directory assistance market, the free directory assistance, wireless., lots of other areas.”
Ultimately, it is all about making AT&T the ultimate all around information hub – whatever the platform. “We want more dentist lookups in San Antonio, Texas than anyone else,” says Stubbs.
He adds that it takes Yellowpages.com beyond the online world, which doesn’t reflect the whole opportunity. “Clicks on line are a phenomenal business, but they are only online. But with AT&T, the call is closer to the cash register (for businesses) than a click. We can sit down with the advertiser and talk about 100, 200, 500 calls over any given period.
The addition of InGenio is also seen as a consolidator platform for AT&T’s growing base of products. “InGenio is about a lot more than call tracking. It is about completing an end-to-end marketplace,” says Stubbs, noting that InGenio comes with a dynamic self -serve ad store and procurement tools. He hopes the self-serve and management capabilities will help cut back on increasingly unwieldy premise sales, which have gone “from one hour to four hours” in recent years.