After shelling out $6 billion for marketing powerhouse aQuantive, is Microsoft still thinking about a achievable Yahoo acquisition? Even though Microsoft execs won;t come perfect out and say it, it sounds such as the solution is no.Microsoft doesn;t require Yahoo;s Panama online-ad platform. With out it, Microsoft is nonetheless sitting fairly appropriate now, with regards to its marketing technique mentioned Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice president and Chief Marketing Strategist,
Office Pro Plus 2010, who offered on Could 23 in the Goldman Sachs World-wide-web Conference. (Mehdi;s presentation was Web-cast,
Office 2010 Activation Key, so I had a likelihood to listen.)For 45 minutes, Mehdi took concerns from Goldman Net and Amusement analyst Anthony Noto along with a few of other conference participants.Noto asked Mehdi whether Microsoft may nonetheless be taking into consideration making one more massive acqusition, for instance the long-rumored Yahoo one, to fill out its marketing portfolio.Mehdi mentioned that apart from a number of “small pieces we;re getting to — organically and otherwise — we have all of the pieces we have to have to be 1 of the top ad platforms.”Like Steve Berkowitz, Microsoft;s Senior Vice President of Internet Services (who also addressed an analyst conference this week), Mehdi emphasized the convergence of Microsoft;s various advertising-related assets. In addition to aQuantive, Microsoft;s acquisitions of Massive (in-game advertising),
Microsoft Office 2010 Standard, TellMe (voice-activated search), MedStory (healthcare search engine), ScreenTonic (mobile search ad platform) and MotionBridge (yet another mobile search provider) give the company a massive family of ad platforms and properties. Microsoft plans to offer advertisers ways to provide ads across the full spectrum of platforms — games, IPTV, on the internet sites, internet services and software, both Mehdi and Berkowitz mentioned.Microsoft via the internet marketing platform, adCenter, will continue to be the centerpiece of its advertising strategy, Mehdi mentioned.“We are very committed to our ad platform,” Mehdi told the Goldman Sachs conference attendees. He said Microsoft currently has 80,000 advertisers signed up to use the platform and that adCenter already has surpassed the monetization provided by Microsoft; old Overture ad platform.Also like Berkowitz, Mehdi attempted to downplay Microsoft;s lackluster search marketshare by emphasizing it potential while in the broader advertising market.“Search and display advertising have essentially converged,” Mehdi stated. The game is “no longer just about pages served,” Mehdi added. “It;s a converged marketplace.”Microsoft isn;t giving up on search, Mehdi said; Microsoft is “absolutely commmitted” to remaining a strong competitor in that space,
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Office 2010 Key, buying audiences, not pages, is becoming much more of an area of interest.“We believe we have the largest audience to monetize,” Mehdi mentioned.