Azoogle Buys Another Lead Gen Firm as Sector Scrutiny Persists

Lead generation firm Azoogle.com announced today it has purchased another lead gen firm, Bazaar Advertising. No deal terms were disclosed.

Of course, the term lead gen has gotten a bad wrap since the Federal Trade Commish has been poking around the sector and since ValueClick confirmed it’s among the firms being investigated by the FTC for its lead gen practices. So, in the press release, Azoogle is calling itself “an end-to-end online marketing solutions provider,” and Bazaar “a marketing services and search engine management company that specializes in the discovery, purchase and optimization of online search campaigns.”

I have no idea what that means, but on the Bazaar site, it clearly states, “Bazaar Advertising is a lead generation company focused on developing and applying proprietary web-search advertising technology for our clients.”

The lead gen industry is getting a lot of attention lately, including from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which just put out a release today calling on lead gen firms “to adopt the recently released ‘Lead Generation Data Transfer Best Practices’ by April 1, 2008.” (See Matthew’s post below.)

Expect the spotlight on this sector to grow hotter before it flames out.