At its Redmond WA headquarters on Friday, Microsoft unveiled a development effort to produce innovative digital ad products that can be deployed on its MSN Search pages and on other media—including, perhaps, Internet-enabled TV.
In an effort called adLab, as many as 40 ad development projects are being conducted jointly by Microsoft’s adCenter product group and technologists in a new Microsoft Research Asia lab in Beijing, China. Many of these prototypes are aimed at producing more highly targeted ads to appear in paid search, contextual and behavioral online ads, which Microsoft expects to deploy on its MSN Search network through adCenter. These efforts will develop advanced targeting and reporting capabilities in order to give advertisers more control over which viewers see those ads.
Other innovations under study take aim at the more distant future when the Internet extends to devices beyond the PC, including camera-equipped mobile phones television sets linked to the Web. These include ad bar-code readers, social network mining and video hyperlinks. The latter would allow viewers to highlight a product pictured in a TV show and click to be taken to an ad for that product and a list of locations where it can be purchased.
“The exciting work being shown at adCenter Demo Fest and the new Microsoft adLab reflects Microsoft’s commitment to innovation in the field of ad products,” said Tarek Najm, adCenter general manager, in a statement. “With this long-term applied research, we will continueto help improve advertisers’ return on investment by delivering rich audience intelligence information and enabling simple and complete controls over all aspects of the advertising campaigns.”
Right now, Microsoft adCenter is fully operational only in France and Singapore and in an invitation-only beta trial in the U.S., where Microsoft says it currently sells about 25% of the ads that appear on MSN results pages. The rest come from Yahoo! Search Marketing under a contract that is set to expire in June 2006. Microsoft said it expects to put adCenter into general launch in this country by that time and to stock MSN and associated Web pages exclusively with ads sold through Microsoft.
