The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Microsoft Advertising Yahoo

Microsoft GM for the search network warns advertisers not to be "beholden" to Google

Author

By Gillian West, Social media manager

December 5, 2012 | 3 min read

"Search advertising is the one of the most efficient ways to advertise,” Microsoft’s general manager for search David Pann has claimed.

Speaking to The Drum, Pann explained that search advertising led marketers to benefit from “the ability to measure the success of your advertising dollars.”

He said: “The truth of the matter is search advertising the most efficient way to advertise…but advertisers need choice and if you put all of your investment in one particular search engine i.e. Google then you are beholden to them and they really are in essence controlling your destiny.”

Three years ago Microsoft’s Bing joined forces with Yahoo! to become “a powerful competition to Google in the marketplace on a global basis,” with most recent statistics showing the Yahoo! Bing Network to have around a 30 per cent market share in the US. According to Pann since the rebrand consumer awareness and usage of the platform have been “pretty amazing”.

In terms of competitors Pann cites Google as “clearly the one we worry about and look at” but added “there is huge competition for search advertising dollars with exchange marketplaces, real time bidding, and to extent social media such as Twitter”. In order to compete with Google the Yahoo! Bing Network “enables marketers to do in 15 minutes what they do in 45 minutes on Google”.

When asked about how the network plans to take on the search engine giant, Pann explained: “We’re going to make it easy for advertisers to transfer all of their campaigns and optimisation work directly into Bing ads, we’ve introduced a product called Import Campaign, it’s a button, you press it and we will automatically log into your Google account take all of your campaign, your key words, your structure, your optimisation and we’ll put them inside of Bing ads in minutes. The reason we did that was we have to remove friction and obstacles for advertisers to be involved in our marketplace”.

He continued: “We want to ensure that advertisers have the right to be able to port their intellectual property, their investment that they’ve made in Google into Bing ads at no cost and with little friction”.

He adds: “The Yahoo! Bing Network provides a very unique audience that are not being represented in Google”.

As well as making investments to take on Google Bing has also become an “integral part of the Windows 8 experience” as it is made available "in every Window 8 installation on the grid”. Though Pann does not like to think of this venture as making a “captive audience” for the platform, “captive seems like we’ve put them in prison…it’s about getting the marketing message to the heart of the consumers at the right place and time”.

Looking forward to 2013 and beyond Pann cites ‘Ad in Apps’ as Microsoft’s main focus but states “we launch new products at least monthly if not weekly, so we are launching a new product somewhere across the globe every week, so that’s how fast we are moving and enhancing the product offering to our advertisers”.

Microsoft Advertising Yahoo

Content created with:

Microsoft

Find out more

More from Microsoft Advertising

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +