Microsoft Unveils AdCenter, Shows Vision for Future Advertising - A Quick Peek at AdCenter
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After delivering his speech, Steve Ballmer introduced Yusuf Mehdi, the company’s chief advertising strategist, and Stuart Frankel. Frankel works for Performics, part of DoubleClick, and has been using AdCenter for his clients. As you would expect, he was there to give a testimonial, and he didn’t disappoint. On the other hand, his words can’t be dismissed as just so much cheerleading; DoubleClick is arguably the largest provider of search engine marketing services in the United States. Frankel said that his company is “really pleased with the results [of using adCenter] and, in fact, they've exceeded expectations.”
Frankel spoke approvingly of the level of automation they were able to achieve, and the extensive tools within the adCenter suite. Of course, what was most likely to interest the audience was performance, and Frankel came to that point very quickly. “And in terms of performance, we're really encouraged by the results that we've seen through our campaign. In particular during the pilot, the vast majority of our clients have seen higher conversion rates on MSN than the other search engines, and so we're very pleased so far.”
One of the key features of adCenter is that it is set up to allow anyone to use their own proprietary tools to access Microsoft’s data, thanks to the API. Users can set up and edit a campaign directly on their own interface, and that is transmitted through the API. While that might not matter so much for small advertisers, for large ones like DoubleClick, this represents a huge savings in man hours.
Frankel seemed particularly pleased with the audience intelligence features, noting that they “allow us to identify those segments of the market that either return the highest ROI or just make more sense from a demographic perspective. So we've designed our program management functionality to take advantage of these features, analyze the data that we capture through the use of these features, and then just drive better investment decisions.”
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