MSN is expected to announce its much anticipated paid search service, adCenter, at an advertising summit today in Redmond. There’s lots of great coverage on this today, including a write-up from Danny Sullivan and commentary by Charlene Li. Several exciting things about this launch: Data, data, and more data: The MSN product provides “in-depth audience [...]

MSN is expected to announce its much anticipated paid search service, adCenter, at an advertising summit today in Redmond. There’s lots of great coverage on this today, including a write-up from Danny Sullivan and commentary by Charlene Li.

Several exciting things about this launch:

1. Data, data, and more data: The MSN product provides “in-depth audience intelligence” – including gender, age group, geographic location, lifestyle segment, and time of day. This mean advertisers will be able to target ads more closely to their audience. Not only to a specific audience, but more closely. This could mean they’ll spend more because they know they’ll be able to better reach key audiences. It also means Google will have to step it up if they want to compete with the user data amassed by portals like MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL.
2. Marketer-side innovation: As Charlene Li points out, it sometimes seems like Google and Yahoo! were, “constantly innovating on the user search experience while search advertising was standing still.” The fact that rich audience data will now be readily available is really great for agencies and marketers and gets them closer to truly targeted search.
3. Advertisers. Big ones. And more of them: Even though Yahoo! stands to lose a sizable chunk of income based upon the paid listings it provides to MSN, they probably won’t be losing advertisers themselves. Neither will Google. This is not a case of people choosing MSN at the expense of the other two, but rather, as Sullivan says, “a new third program most everyone will likely feel it’s essential to enroll in.” More heavy hitter advertisers will get on board as features and choices broaden and prices drop.

More coverage on USAToday here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 10:50 am and is filed under Advertising: Distribution, Microsoft, Search: Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.