Microsoft changes video ad tactic
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Microsoft Corp. is testing a way to present video advertising that's less annoying to Web surfers.
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The producer of ads featuring PC users who switched to Macs is applying the same tactic to political commercials. This time, he'll focus on former backers of President Bush, recruited online, who've changed their political allegiance. By Louise Witt.
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The computer is impersonal again If you thought adverts on the web have become more offensive and more intrusive than ever before, then it might be time to find alternatives to using software from Microsoft.â¦
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The shift parallels the increasing appearance in the new media of ads celebrating sports.
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Conversations I've had this week at TechEd with attendees have made me rethink an opinion I stated early on, about how nice it was to see Microsoft toning down the marketing message and getting down to brass, technical tacks.  Some IT managers who want their employers to get the message of Windows Server 2008, would appreciate it if that message were easier to be "got."
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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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NEW YORK, Dec. 12  /PRNewswire/ -- Pulse 360, Inc., the content-targeted sponsored links innovator, today announced the ability for advertisers to target viewers of online videos by appending ad listings to the beginning or end of a video.
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Companies are getting more mileage out of their commercials by streaming ads and creating archives on their own Web sites.
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Microsoft is launching an online video-sharing service to compete with YouTube.
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YouTube is expected to launch a form of advertising on some of its video clips today, employing a user-controlled method that is gaining ground as marketers and Web sites look for ways to make money while keeping viewers engaged.
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Itâsa feature thatâs already found in several other digital video recording software packages, but Microsoft says theyâre going to add a new service called MSN Remote Record thatâll let you use any browser to remotely schedule a PC running Windows
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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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LOS ANGELES  - Before deleting that  television show you just watched courtesy of TiVo, you'll be  given the option to view a commercial, the latest in a series  of enhancements the DVR pioneer will launch in an effort to  profit from the proliferation of ad-skipping.
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One of the challenges Microsoft and computer makers face in marketing Media Center PCs is persuading consumers that it&#39;s worth putting them in their living room, supplanting the normal setup of TV, VCR, DVD player and/or personal video recorder.
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Blog: Blinkx now offering contextual ads for video.
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First it was lines from the songs and now its ad taglines that are being lifted as film titles
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. hopes to bank on the popularity of online video-sharing services such as YouTube and Google Video with its own competitive service, which goes into beta on Tuesday. Soapbox on MSN Video, which will allow users to upload and share personal videos with others who use the service, is now available as a beta release in the U.S. for the Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox browsers. The service initially is available by invitation-only, though users who want to take part in the beta can sign up for a waiting list at http://soapbox.msn.com Like competing video-sharing services, Soapbox will allow users not only to upload videos to the Web in almost any digital video format, but also to tag and categorize them so other users can find them. The service will let users both watch videos and browse for new ones simultaneously on the same screen, something that differentiates it from YouTube, Microsoft said. Other features in Soapbox include the ability for users to set up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for videos in which they are interested, and to embed videos directly into their personal blogs. To achieve the latter, Microsoft eventually will set up one-click integration between Soapbox and Windows Live Spaces, letting users upload videos from Soapbox to their Windows Live Spaces pages by clicking on a button. Eventually, Soapbox will be integrated throughout many of Microsoft's online services, which include Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail. The Soapbox service will work with IE 6 or later browsers running on Windows XP, and the Firefox 1.0.5 browser or later running on Windows XP or Macintosh OS X. Social networking services and media-sharing communities are becoming all the rage with the current breed of Web users, with sites like YouTube and the online community MySpace -- which generate revenue through advertising -- steadily gaining in popularity. However, though these sites are increasingly becoming part of the pop-culture zeitgeist, but they are so far unproven financially. Like its other Web-based services, Microsoft aims for Soapbox, too, to generate revenue by luring online advertisers, the company said. Though it won't be ad supported in its initial release, Microsoft hopes the service will feature advertising down the line.