Microsoft aligns ad strategy across company
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(InfoWorld) - In a move aimed at making it easier for customers to purchase advertising,Â MicrosoftÂ unveiled on Monday an organization that aligns all of its advertising sales, research and planning efforts. The Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions team -- which falls under the division overseen by Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's Platforms & Services -- gives customers one group within Microsoft for all of their advertising needs, said Eric Hadley, general manager of global marketing for Microsoft. The organization comprises former MSN advertising sales employees as well as others involved in advertising at Microsoft across other divisions. The company also has been hiring employees to fuel its advertising efforts, and they will join the new division, Hadley said. Until recently, Microsoft's MSN site was the only place where the company offered advertising, Hadley said. But in the last 18 months, the company has built out a portfolio of products that offer a range of advertising options, such as Xbox Live as well as its Windows Live and Office Live Web-based services. "Advertising is now a core asset across all aspects of the company," Hadley said. Microsoft realized it needed to unify how customers could purchase advertising across all of these properties for a comprehensive advertising plan, he said. Microsoft Chief Executive OfficerÂ Steve Ballmer has expressed his intentÂ on more than one occasion to overtake competitors GoogleÂ and Yahoo Â in the online advertising market. Microsoft has said it plans to spend $500 million in its current fiscal year to expand its online business, with a big focus on increasing advertising sales. Eventually, Microsoft's adCenter platform will play a big role in helping to streamline Microsoft's advertising efforts, Hadley said. Right now, the platform,Â which Microsoft launched in the U.S. in May, offers only sales of keyword searches. But eventually adCenter will allow customers to purchase advertising across all of the Microsoft properties that offer it, he said. In its last quarterly earnings call in July, Microsoft said it was not seeing a big uptick in revenue yet from adCenter, and skeptics are doubtful the company will be catching up to competitors in online advertising revenue anytime soon. However, Hadley said Monday that Microsoft is seeing "a lot of growth" in sales through adCenter, and believes that the formation of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions will help support this trend. "You know with Microsoft -- we don't always get it right right from the start, but we feel we're going in the right direction by aligning all the company assets behind advertising," Hadley said.
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Microsoft recently launched a &#39;Get the Facts&#39; ad campaign telling consumers Linux isn&#39;t cheaper than Windows. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) thinks they should get the facts too -- but it&#39;s warned Microsoft to make sure its are straight first.
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PC maker Dell and software company Microsoft have formed a development partnership to improve the way customers manage systems across the enterprise.
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Entertainment company teams up with new ad seller from the software giant.
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Microsoft Corp.  may need  to cut prices or pursue a deal similar to Yahoo Inc.&#039;s   and online auctioneer eBay Inc.&#039;s  partnership to gain  ground in the lucrative Internet advertising market, analysts  said on Thursday.
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LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - Software giant Microsoft is  casting its sights on the digital media marketplace by  positioning itself as pro-consumer-choice.
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Google undeservedly has gotten all the credit for many clicks on the&#160;online ads&#160;it delivers via its search engine, but Microsoft wants to put a stop to that.So said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Advertiser Publisher Solutions Group during a panel discussion at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Thursday.Currently, systems for tracking ad conversions and analyzing online marketing campaigns focus on the last ad a user viewed or clicked on, he said. This gives all credit to that last publisher and not to others the user may have been at before and influenced the user to seek more information about the advertiser, McAndrews said.In particular, this situation has unfairly benefitted Google because many times someone will see a display ad on a site and go to Google, search for the vendor&#39;s name, and then click on the vendor&#39;s text ad served by Google, he said.But Microsoft is developing a technology called &quot;conversion attribution&quot; that will track the trail of ads seen by a user, so that advertisers get a more complete understanding of how effective their marketing campaigns are, he said.Along the way, advertisers will get a more balanced view of the value of their ads across a wider trail of Web sites and via a variety of ad formats, not just the last ad displayed by the last publisher, which is often Google, he said.&quot;We&#39;ll introduce conversion attribution to give [more publishers] credit and it will devalue search [advertising],&quot; McAndrews said.Search advertising is the largest online ad format, accounting for about 40 percent of total ad spend. Google has built its empire on these pay-per-click ads, which the company matches to the content of queries on its search engine and to the content of third-party Web sites on its ad network.While search has been the main driver of the blistering growth of online advertising in the past five years, that won&#39;t be the case in the coming five years, McAndrews said.In addition to the &quot;conversion attribution&quot; technology, the shift away from search ads will be fueled by the increased spending in online ads from large companies which prefer display and rich media advertising designed to boost their brands, and for which pay-per-click text ads are less effective, he said.Google didn&#39;t have any representatives participating in the panel. The company didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comment.Microsoft didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for clarification on the availability of the &quot;conversion attribution&quot; technology.McAndrews, who&#160;came to Microsoft recently via its $6 billion purchase of aQuantive, of which he was the CEO, shared the stage with other ad executives in a panel titled &quot;Edge: The Advertising Model&quot; moderated by conference chair John Battelle.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft will participate in a meeting later this month with vendors and organizations that are backing several different identity management systems, an indication that&#160;cooperation between the software giant and its peers&#160;is improving.
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Microsoft continues to make acquisitions to boost its online services and advertising strategy. Early Wednesday, the company said it snapped up Multimap, a U.K. company that provides online mapping for Europe, North America, and Australia.
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Microsoft is taking solid aim at a business that is arguably outside its core competence: advertising.
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Blog: Microsoft adds Ask keyword ad sales to its adManager service for small businesses.
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Microsoft demonstrated its in-game advertising platform from its acquisition of Massive in Times Square in New York City on Tuesday.
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While Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo appears to be aimed at capturing a share of the rapidly growing online advertising market dominated by Google, some observers think the move would also position Microsoft in the emerging market for mobile advertising.
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Microsoft rolled out its long-planned response to Google and Yahoo in the Internet search industry on Wednesday.
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For nearly a year, television and Internet audiences have been seeing a familiar string of ads from Apple attacking rival Windows-based computers. With this week's release of Windows Vista, the newest jabs aren't any friendlier.
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(InfoWorld) - Word that Microsoft had a crack team of developers in Silicon Valley working on a cutting-edge search project is news to the company's head of search and advertising. "When they get it done, I hope they'll send me a link to it so I'll know about it," Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's search and advertising platform group, jokingly said late on Monday at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle. He was responding to a question about a rumor making the rounds online that a team of engineers at Microsoft's Mountain View office is working on a new search engine to replace its existing one. While Nadella denied any specific effort to build a new search engine, he did say that his group, as a very young search operation compared to some other giants, would need to take risks in order to improve its position. Microsoft search is just over 3 years old and has about 10 percent of the market, he said. "We'll experiment," he said. One way that Microsoft may work to improve its search ranking is by trying to leverage its position as a content provider. The MSN portal has around 500 million unique users globally, he said. His group is trying to find ways to encourage them to use Microsoft's Live search. The MSN A-List is an example of that effort. The A-List is a page that shows top searches on Live search. In addition, the main Microsoft.com page only recently got a Live search bar, he said. Microsoft will also have to differentiate its search product from the others to get ahead, he said. Offerings like 3D maps, where he thinks Microsoft is in the lead, as well as mobile and image search could help the company gain users. Longer term, Nadella wants to experiment with and "reconceptualize" the search user interface. There's a "ton" of innovation that can be done on the user experience side, he said. In addition to innovating on new products, Nadella's group will get more scientific in researching how customers use Live search. "The crux of our problem is how do we get existing searchers to use it more," he said. To figure out how to do that, he wants to have more data about things like abandonment rates. Microsoft has an uphill battle to fight as it competes against current search leaders. Microsoft's Live search trails far behind Google, which has about half of the search market share. Yahoo, the second largest search provider, had nearly 27 percent share in April, according to ComScore Networks.
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NEW YORK -- The media company that owns MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Pictures said Wednesday that it will now advertise online through Microsoft Corp. as part of a larger deal.