Stacey Harris, MSN’s Agency Marketing Manager, rounded out the big three presentations by discussing Microsoft’s advertising vision.
“When I think of Microsoft, I think of Outlook, I think of Internet Explorer, I think of my computer crashing… but I don’t think of advertising.” Starting off with honesty helped – refreshingly disarming. Her top level take is that Microsoft does have an audience, one that advertisers want to connect with, so now it’s just bridging that gap.
That sounds like a no-brainer the way she lays it out, though that’s a far cry from Microsoft’s stance in the previous decade. In the ‘olden days,’ Microsoft had suites of products, which consumers either bought or found pre-installed on their computers. It was all sales and distribution deals. If Microsoft had 500 million users (my own made-up number, not Stacey’s), it didn’t care about monetizing them beyond upselling. Advertising only became a factor recently.
Stacey switched gears and got into Microsoft adCenter Labs – adlab.microsoft.com. Great set of research tools. I only recently took a dive into them, and you’ll find quite a few gems to pepper into research reports and sales presentations, and you might even gain some new insight into consumer behavior and trends affecting your business.
Lastly, she plugged Live.com, namely its personalized homepage and Windows Live Search.
