Marc Barach, chief marketing officer of Ingenio, said the move--the company's first podcast deal--is aimed at expanding the distribution of pay-per-call ads beyond local search engines. "Part of our strategy here in Ingenio's pay-per-call world is to push relevant pay-per-call ads wherever consumers are--wherever they engage in content," he said. "It extends the pay-per-call reach out to mediums that are not desktop-bound."
Barach said that podcasts were another area that Ingenio would be focusing on, after moving into free 411 services through a partnership with Jingle Networks and SMS local search through a partnership with UpSnap.
Barach said that the ads will begin appearing in Podbridge's podcasts this month, and will be largely from the financial services and travel sectors. The Podbridge ad-serving platform tracks the number of listeners and downloads, and also allows ads to be inserted on a dynamic basis and targeted by demographics and geography.