Feb 25 2008
Microsoft and their continual Ad Push
With their acquisition of aQuantive last year, the proposed Yahoo! takeover, and their continual gluttoness spending on their online services division no one doubts that the folkal up in Redmond are damm serious about online adversiting. A couple morsels in todays news.
First.., they are looking to hijack Fox Interactive from Google and take over ads on MySpace. The G guys whined about the in-ability to monetize social network traffic during their quarterly reporting. The TechCrunch guys point that fact out that the MySpace deal was made in haste and is not really working out for them. I think that might be part of it.., but I also just think they were dropping some shit talking Google PR style towards Facebook basically saying that its really hard to make $$ on social networking traffic. Any way you look at it, this would be HUGE for MS. Snagging Fox Interactive and MySpace would be another great snag for them including Digg, and of course the Facebook deal.
Secondly MS annouced some ad technology they will be releasing pretty soon that aims to cause a change in the online ad sector to not focus entirely on click throughs. They call this “Engagement Mapping”. They havent provided too many details but it seems like its a combination of cookies and online authentication through various properties that will track the ads you view/click and utlimately act on to make purchases. They will be providing some sort of score to gauge how the consumers are actually engaged in various touch points. This could be great for the big ad players.., my friends at P&G and the rest of the CPG space should eat this up if MS can execute correctly.
Lastly.., Avenue A/Razorfish.., which is now owned by MS through the aQuantive purchase released their Avenue A Razorfish 2008 Outlook Report. You can read the report, a couple key pts were that vertical content and paid search were the biggest winners in the increased spending last year, online should be shielded from any economic downturn this year (which is mirrors what the Advertising Age folks are reporting), and the home page is becoming more and more devalued as users are landing deeper in a site through search and other means.
[…] has a blog with a post talking about how Traffic is Dead, Hail the King. In my post the other day about Microsoft, I talked about their continual ad push, and their anouncement regarding their “Engagement […]