Microsoft is finally looking at getting into the search engine advertising market for themselves. They announced yesterday the launch of a new pay-per-click service called AdCenter [press release]. Currently MSN uses Yahoo’s Search Marketing (formerly Overture) for its search advertising. The contract for this service runs through July of next year, but Microsoft says they will continue to work with Yahoo.
AdCenter will look to leverage Microsoft’s profile data to give advertisers access to not only specific keywords but geographic location, gender, age group, lifestyle segment and time of day. This new information should help provide a more target rich environment for marketers.
Charlene Li:
All in all, the entry of MSN provides much needed competition – it seemed like Google and Yahoo were constantly innovating on the user search experience while search advertising was standing still (OK, I’ll allow that geographic and contextual ads have been innovative, but nothing as potentially game-changing as targeted search).
And it appears that marketers agree. I’ve been speaking with several marketers and agencies over the past few months that have had the opportunity to preview the new service and there is wide-eyed excitement at the prospect of having rich audience intelligence at their disposal. I think the reality is that it will take a while for the promise to be met, especially since true targeted search – where you can selective buy access to specific audiences — is still a while off.
Search Engine Watch:
What’s all this mean for Yahoo? Obviously, it’s set to eventually lose a chunk of income it gains by providing paid listings to MSN. However, despite some analyst quotes I’ve seen, it’s not going to somehow lose advertisers themselves. Neither is Google.
Advertisers are not going to flock to MSN and abandon the other two, because the only way on the sizeable networks the other two operate is to stay with them. They have non-duplicated pages views.
Instead, MSN is going to be the new third program most everyone will likely feel it’s essential to enroll in. That was certainly the case when I asked a room of about 400 people at SES New York earlier this month what they’d do if MSN launched its own program, as was rumored during the show to be coming. Virtually everyone said they’d sign up. And virtually everyone said they’d stay with the other two, as well.
Chris Garret has a couple pictures. This looks pretty cool:
Eric Anderson at 4:15 pm
