Microsoft acquisition targets television ad market
Posted by: admin in Engagements and Deals NewsFiled under: Deals
Not long after closing the door on the pursuit of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), an acquisition that would have boosted its on the internet advertising business, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is making another buy — albeit much smaller — that could enhance its ad presence in an entirely different way. The software giant is acquiring Navic Networks Inc., a venture-backed company that makes software to enable the placement of targeted ads for TV.
While the deal has largely gone under the radar, probably due to its undisclosed buy price, it is an intriguing move for Microsoft, which over the course of the Yahoo! saga pretty much came clean with its desire to improve its home-grown advertising business. The software giant, however, to date has largely expressed an interest in Internet advertising. The lines between TV and Internet are indeed blurring these days, with more cable and network content being made available on the web and more original content being created for World wide web protocol TV. Nonetheless, in its statement announcing the Navic buy, Microsoft seemed mostly interested in the traditional TV market, noting that “television media represents the largest percentage of advertisers and agencies’ media budget this day.” The company said it now plans to work more closely with the advertising industry to help advertisers superior attain their objectives.
In many ways, today’s television advertising looks like a business that time and technology forgot. Advertisers trying to track audience sizes use the same tool they used decades ago: Nielson Media Research. Nielson surveys a representative sample of Television viewers to produce reports estimating the total audience size but uses few of the bells and whistles on the web advertisers have at their disposal to get not only a more accurate view of the audience size, but to see how engaged that audience was, in the form of click-throughs and other measures.
Continue reading at TechConfidential.com.
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