Updated with details from the Microsoft/LinkedIn investor call. Microsoft’s surprise $26.2 billion deal to acquire LinkedIn, among the largest digital technology acquisitions ever if it goes through, has the potential to transform the competitive dynamics in the CRM software industry. It also holds the promise of rebirth for Microsoft’s moribund, outsourced digital advertising business, via […]
Susan Athey will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO conference in San Francisco on April 14. Academia has a unique role to play in supporting the digital economy, as its members bring a completely different perspective to studying ad auctions. The academic underpinning of ad auctions isn’t new – Hal Varian, Google chief economist and early AdWords designer, […]
Microsoft’s ad offering is getting a facelift with the addition of premium ad formats from AOL, beginning first with its MSN.com property. MSN will get access to five new ad types, including adaptive mobile units such as AOL’s Devil Full Page Flex. It’s the first major ad update for the company since Microsoft transferred its […]
Rocket Fuel is speeding up the rollout of its device graph. Starting in Q1, the programmatic platform company will make cross-device targeting the default mode for marketer and agency clients of its self-serve DSP. Those customers include Microsoft, which does its own US digital ad buying in-house. Microsoft’s top B2B marketing exec in the US, […]
If ad tech is a dinner party, someone forgot to invite the creative – or, at least, that’s what it can often feels like to the marketers and agencies tasked with creative production and testing. “I’ve been on the agency side and now I’m on the marketing side, and through both of those lenses I’ve […]
When AOL agreed in June to bring Microsoft’s sales organization into AOL, nearly doubling the amount of front-line salespeople to a total of 1,000, head of sales Jim Norton saw an opportunity. AOL knew there were a number of ways it could improve its sales force to better align with the organization’s structure: custom solutions […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Matt Maroon, a targeting and programmatic sales specialist at Microsoft. After my freshman year of college, I took a short leave from school and moved to Central America. I had taken Spanish courses for […]
Microsoft isn’t the advertising behemoth it once aspired to be when it purchased aQuantive for $6 billion in 2007. Since then, Microsoft has mostly been a publisher, selling inventory both directly and programmatically across its Microsoft Network (MSN) family of sites, its Outlook email portal, Skype and Xbox. Following the Microsoft-AOL search and display deal, […]
While AOL’s absorption of Microsoft’s display, search and video ads business is indicative of Verizon’s digital media interests, industry insiders aren’t quite convinced the flagship publications it inherited through the AOL acquisition will stick around for the long haul. An early Huffington Post exec said Verizon will need to treat the media group like “a […]
In a new 10-year search-and-advertising alliance, Microsoft will transfer the lion’s share of its display ad business to Verizon-owned AOL. Under the deal, approximately 1,200 Microsoft employees will get offer letters from AOL, most of them in ad sales. Additionally, AOL will end its search distribution relationship with Google in order to accept Bing search and ads on […]
Microsoft wanted to drum up interest for its digital note-taking app, OneNote, and needed to reach a generation of students who’d grown up on Apple devices. A big part of its consumer push is bringing heritage products like PowerPoint and Word into the mobile age by supplementing these tools with new cloud apps. Last winter, […]
Microsoft has reversed its approach to Do Not Track (DNT) and will no longer make it the default setting on the Internet Explorer browser and IE’s eventual replacement, Spartan. In a Good Friday blog post, Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch said the decision was made in order to comply with the World Wide Web […]
Although native advertising is typically used for branding, it can provide results for direct-response campaigns. That was the goal for Microsoft Store – the software giant’s answer to the Apple Store – when it launched a test in early July along with Seattle-based agency Point It and native ad-tech platform TripleLift. The native ad-tech company […]
Once upon a time, Microsoft seemed to be positioning itself as both a publisher, via its network of owned and operated sites, as well as an ad tech provider – sort of like where AOL is today. In 2007, it bought aQuantive for just north of $6 billion, which included major digital marketing players like […]
Chango’s new CRO, Keith Lorizio, has an ad tech CV as long as your arm – but it was only a short while ago that he became a convert to the gospel of programmatic. “I wasn’t a fan of programmatic about three years ago back when I was a rep with a big publisher working […]
During a presentation at the AppNexus annual Summit last November, Microsoft’s Esco Strong made a promise to beef up its exchange inventory. As of Tuesday, Strong, director of programmatic managements, said that promise had been fulfilled in the form of new mobile inventory being made available in the Microsoft Advertising Exchange (MAX). Advertisers in the US, Australia, […]
Scott Ferris, GM of television and video at Microsoft Advertising, has been in the video biz for around three decades. For seven of those years, Ferris has been at Microsoft, heading up its video business group. Most recently however, he’s taken the lead role in what Microsoft calls its Content and Entertainment business group, which […]
Mobile app analytics is an increasingly competitive space, as reflected by two acquisitions unveiled Wednesday. Mobile app analytics firm App Annie acquired its competitor, the mobile analytics company Distimo, and Microsoft also bought a mobile app analytics startup. Based in San Francisco, App Annie’s services include app-ranking data, app store SEO tools and marketplace intelligence. […]
Facebook’s Atlas Advertiser Suite is laying the groundwork to support “programmatic direct” buys for Microsoft inventory. Beginning in early 2015, Atlas will begin supporting programmatic purchases of Microsoft ads directly through the Atlas interface. Atlas customers will be able to query avails in Microsoft’s ad serving system and reserve guaranteed buys programmatically. Over time the […]
Microsoft and Yahoo are loosening their stranglehold on their premium display inventory. MediaMath has set up a buying program that includes guaranteed direct buys in a programmatic environment. The program is enabled through partnerships with publishers Yahoo and Microsoft, along with technology partners Shiny Ads, iSocket and Yieldex. The partnership represents the latest industry attempt […]
“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jay Seideman, US director of the targeting and exchange team at Microsoft. Programmatic has been never simple. But back in 2010, programmatic only meant one thing: the auctioning off […]
Microsoft has added new ad formats to Skype’s “connection hub,” the screen users see before and after placing calls and while instant messaging each other. The new placements are a logical way to boost Skype’s monetization. The company hopes connection hub ads will generate an at least 20 billion additional impressions per month for advertisers. […]
Microsoft is providing more transparency into the inventory on the Microsoft Advertising Exchange. The inventory on the Exchange was previously sold in a “blind” manner using a masked URL. Ad buyers can now target the inventory by its top-level domain name and sub-domains, the company said Friday. “We want to give customers a clearer view […]
Location-based marketing technology company MomentFeed is betting big on the hyper-local search and marketing movement. Founded in 2010, the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) company has raised $3 million in seed funding and recently closed a $6 million Series A round. According to its chairman and CEO Robert Blatt, MomentFeed is “the first company to […]
After years of handling programmatic with a light touch, Microsoft is making up for lost time. It has recently rolled out global programmatic direct options, agreements with other portals on automated ad serving standards, and last week, the addition of Window 8.1 apps and Outlook.com email-based placements. Esco Strong, director Microsoft’s of Display Marketplace, said […]
Bank of America’s card-linked offers program, BankAmeriDeals, offers customers cash back when they purchase from any of 4,000 partnering retail merchants. Cash-back discount deals are surfaced to customers right in the Online Banking environment, based on their past purchase history. Powered by purchase data platform Cardlytics, Bank of America, to date, has issued about $17 […]
Microsoft has added a new unique identifier to Windows 8.1 to help app developers better monetize their apps, the company said today. “Specifically, in Windows 8.1 we include a unique identifier that can be used to improve the quality and relevance of advertisements displayed within Windows Store apps while providing other services such as analytics […]
The major reorg that retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer engineered two months ago is resulting in the end of its portal MSN producing original content. As detailed by Romenesko, MSN freelancers were told in a mass email that their services would no longer be needed and that the budget for original content was “zero” for […]
Digital ad veteran Brian McAndrews has been named chairman, president and CEO of streaming music service Pandora. He replaced Joe Kennedy, who announced his intention to retire in March. (Read the release.) McAndrews built one of the first digital agency networks at aQuantive, where beginning in 1999 he began rolling up firms including Razorfish, Avenue […]
Under two separate deals that took place this week, Microsoft, Nokia, Verizon and Vodafone took steps that speak to the companies’ expectations for the smartphone market and the telecom industry as a whole. Microsoft’s decision to acquire Nokia’s devices and services division could help it shore up its place in the smartphone ecosystem while Verizon […]
