As Nokia and Google square up against one another in the nascent mobile internet market, Microsoft has been pushed into the position of playing catch-up, with Yahoo taking a rather different line, working more closely with operators than its rivals, and potentially being a future partner for Nokia. Microsoft is starting to make its moves though, and last week echoed recent Google and Nokia activities by launching adverts on its MSN Mobile portal in the US and by acquiring a mapping company, Multimap.
Microsoft has already started offering banner and text adverts on its portal in Europe and Japan and has now extended the service, which like Google promises ads tailored for comfortable mobile browser viewing, to its homeland.
As for Multimap, the UK company’s technology will be integrated with Microsoft’s existing Virtual Earth, Live Search and Windows Live services, plus MSN and the aQuantive advertising platform offerings, to try to leap a step ahead of its major rivals in the much cherished goal of offering the most advanced location sensitive advertising services to clients and consumers. The software giant says the deal will enable it to integrate more of its existing products and services into location-based offerings.
Multimap provides a publicly available mapping service to consumers and also provides integrated business services. It will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft as part of the Virtual Earth and Search teams in the Online Services Group.
‘Microsoft is continuing to make significant investments in the MSN Mobile portal, adding new services and content that enhance the mobile experience,’ said Joanne Bradford, corporate VP at MSN. ‘By incorporating advertising on MSN Mobile, we are allowing advertisers to extend their existing campaigns from PCs to games and now to mobile phones, further delivering on our vision to extend advertising across multiple platforms and devices.’ Paramount Pictures and Jaguar Cars North America are among the first companies to advertise on MSN Mobile.
The mobile advertising platform is based partly on technology Microsoft acquired with France-based ScreenTonic earlier this year. That company has a strong showing of mobile web advertising across Europe and offers management software, and all the usual internet advertising formats, banners, animated banners, links to advertisers mobile sites, video banners and ad words, on handsets. It even offers non-fast forwarded videos in front of streamed and downloaded video files.
At present ScreenTonic says that it markets an inventory of 100m pages with ads and that it achieves click-through rates from 1.5% to 6% on its advertising.
Microsoft is clearly adopting a strategy of at least exploring advertising that bypasses the operator, and while that may raise the hackles of some operators, and it may make then even more suspicious than they already are about Microsoft, it will mean gaining a platform access to handsets that are not limited to Windows Mobile handsets, as all the ScreenTonic systems are written in Java.
A recent example of the type of thing that ScreenTonic can do is the Reebok campaign that ran for a month in France when Reebok had signed famous French soccer player Thierry Henry. It works with location-based services to help the customer find the closest store that sells the range that is being advertised. The campaign went across cellular rivals Orange and Vodafone, both French market leaders.
Screen Tonic software is called STAMP and it can target the delivery of the ad in keeping with technical criteria, such as handset capabilities (particularly audio capacities, video, screen size and Java), the portal formats (WAP, XHTML, video, Java, rich media) and the information sent by the portals (bearer, user information and geolocation). It also incorporates the user targeting constraints such as capping (controlling the repetition of ads seen per contact).
In the end what Microsoft has been working towards on its AdCenter advertising systems is a way to reach any demographic on any and multiple platforms, at any time. If people are going to fragment their attention into multiple activities, involving multiple screens, then gone are the days when a national broadcasting footprint will reach everyone in a given country and this is a valuable route to go down.
In capturing DoubleClick recently in a $3.1 billion acquisition, Google intensified the war between Microsoft and Google over dominating internet advertising systems, and while TV, newspaper and radio auctioning systems seems to have been the recent focus of attention for Google, the handset cannot be far away from its thinking, and as we know it may soon launch its own advertising driven handset.