Microsoft Unveils AdCenter, Shows Vision for Future Advertising - More About AdCenter
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Yusuf Mehdi jumped in after Frankel to discuss more details about adCenter, specifically what was coming next as Microsoft works on improving the service. Contextual advertising is going to be a major push in this area. In fact, the company has a pilot project planned for the summer focusing on contextual advertising, which is what Mehdi focused on next in his discussion.
From the sounds of it, adCenter is intended to go beyond paid search engine advertising. Mehdi demonstrated setting up an ad campaign, explaining that “I can do targeted content on the entire network, or I can, for example, pick specific parts of the network…pretty soon we'll give you an access to look at the entire network that becomes the MSN adCenter contextual network.”
AdCenter will also include the ability to create ads with images. Users will be able to pick the image ads they want and set them up to run on different areas of MSN’s network. This will differentiate the service from other search-based advertising, which has mostly followed Google’s lead in offering ads composed almost entirely of text.
Mehdi explained that adCenter will also afford users some different ways of matching up their ads. “So we can, of course, match by keyword, but we'll now do things like matching by category through some of the advanced matching algorithms we have.” He went on to explain that users could, for example, target luxury car buyers on the network, or even pick specific websites by URL.
But it’s the plans beyond the pilot that seem more exciting. Mehdi mentioned an incubation site where the company is working on doing advanced research in advertising, then highlighted one of the projects: demographic prediction. According to Mehdi, “contextual [advertising] works great if you know the context of the page, but clearly the context of the page is not super helpful if you're in…user created content. So one of the things we do with demographic prediction is…we start to do some analysis of keywords and URLs to get the demographics.”
In short, they have the information to figure out what kinds of people are searching for what, analyze the content of a web page, and figure out what demographic group(s) would be interested in the content of the page. Once the research from this project is incorporated into adCenter, users will be able to type in URLs for websites and get a picture of their demographics. “And this is going to return better ROI for advertisers,” explained Mehdi.
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