Category: microsoft

Ad Exchanges Are the Future

There’s a great article on Clickz by Eric Picard called ‘Ad Exchanges Are the Future‘. Eric works for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. He has written a very clear description of what’s wrong with the current trading practices in media buying (outside of search) and how that’s going to change in the next 5 to 10 years.

The opening paragraph of his article states:

Advertising is one of the last significant business markets that remains opaque, manual, archaically complex, and requires a large relatively skilled set of humans to perform each transaction. It’s a market ripe to embrace technology for automation, liquidity of inventory, pricing transparency, and simplification of business process.

Extremely well put.

Microsoft adChamps

On Thursday I was the guest of Microsoft at their adChamps event. Around 40 advertisers and agencies, large and small were invited to a full day with their engineers, researchers and executives. Microsoft have a lot of challenges in Europe and all credit to them for sharing their plans and visions for the adCenter platform. They invited feedback; they received it in spades.

I won’t go into detail about the day (and in fact an NDA prevents me from doing so) but it’s enough to say that Microsoft has some big plans for the online advertising market and the next few years will be extremely interesting. It was fascinating to meet people like Tarek Najm and it was extremely well organised and hosted by Mel Carson, AKA AdCenterEU.

The day was rounded off by dinner at the Mint Leaf restaurant on Haymarket. I stumbled out at about 12.30am; around an hour later some people tried to blow up the whole street.

Update

Microsoft generously gave everyone who attended a goodie bag which contained either Vista or Office 2007.  I chose the latter and installed it yesterday.  It’s a significant improvement on Office 2003.