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Joanne Bradford who is Microsoft’s current MSN honcho and former Microsoft Web ad czar (“We love ad salesmen“) is leaving Microsoft for startup Spot Runner which is nominally an “Internet-based ad agency that makes it easy and affordable for local businesses to advertise on TV.” The trick apparently is to have canned creative content that can be easily modified for a local business. Bradford reportedly will be executive vice president of National Marketing Services, focused on national advertisers” which sounds like a good fit for her and apparently also fits somewhere in Spot Runner’s business model.
As for MSN, former Bradford direct report Greg Nelson, who is the general manager of MSN.com International, will be running things on an interim basis. I would chalk this up as yet more turmoil in Microsoft’s online business – the departure of Bradford’s boss Steve Berkowitz was announced in February. Of course, we’ll really see turmoil if the Yahoo deal goes through and Bradford may well have been dodging exactly that.
Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Israeli ad targeting firm, YaData. The company makes and sells analytic software to help Internet marketers segment audiences in greater detail for better ad targeting.
Microsoft today announced an agreement to acquire YaData Ltd., a provider of advanced tools for the discovery of unique customer segments. YaData’s technology will enable Microsoft to provide its advertisers with richer targeting capabilities so they can connect with their audience in more efficient and engaging ways, at the same time providing its customers more relevant and focused ads. The YaData team will join Microsoft’s Israel R&D center in Herzliya and YaData’s solutions will be deployed through Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group.
The price tag is rumored at $20-30 million. I offer my usual observation that better ad targeting inherently means less user privacy which may some day come home to roost at the hands of government regulators.
Microsoft today announced an agreement with CNBC to be the financial network’s exclusive provider for banner and contextual ads for the fledgling CNBC.com (replacing Google’s would-be acquisition DoubleClick). You may recall that CNBC.com went its own way last year after having been hosted on MSN.
Yesterday was Facebook’s big debut party for their new platform designed to milk some cash from their faithful members via “social” advertising. Any sarcasm on my part would be superfluous after Nicholas Carr’s application of a flamethrower, but one interesting aspect was that Microsoft, who a year ago was working with Facebook “on future technology and advertising initiatives” and recently bought a slice of the company, was relegated to the position of being merely one of 60 initial advertisers on the new platform.
So where does Microsoft fit into Facebook’s overall advertising plans? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains:
