October 5, 2007
highly recommended reading:
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James Cherkoff, who was in Paris with me earlier this week, has a really good write-up on Microsoft deciding to seriously enter the advertising game.
So what’s the good news you may well be asking?
Well, Microsoft may be about to radically step up their aspirations in the world of advertising, but they have decided to play nice. They think that they their best chance of slicing off a large piece of the advertising pie — and preventing the whole market being run by Google — is to co-operate with the advertising industry not try and vaporise it. Ballmer and co have decided they need the people who understand the more subjective part of the marketing equation, otherwise known as branding, which even the most powerful algorithms can’t get their processors around. Yet.
[Just added this post to the Blue Monster series.]
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Tags: Advertising, Blue Monster, James Cherkoff, Microsoft
given that the experience is very much in the hands of the user I for one remain hopeful that the algorithm will never come…
Couldn’t agree more Hugh. It was a great piece which brought into very few words what I am sure was an enormous piece of work/promotion.
Mr. Ballmer,
too bad you threw away all those archives from your newsgroups. Such very rich ideas the people had there. You could have used them for idea generating. Silly Blue Monster again. (rapid action digestive tract copyrighted 2007 nmk. don’t you even think about using that)
Note: if you are wondering at sarcasm, scorn, or menopausal madness.
it’s neither/ nor/ nor.
Just the facts, man or ma’am.
MSFT has “decided to play nice”?
Who knew they could be such “nice” guys, protecting us from big bad monopolist Google like that?
It’s truly admirable that they deign to not vaporise the people who understand a business they intend to enter (but admit they don’t yet understand) until that knowledge is assimilated or obsoleted.
Never before have we seen them promise to “be nice” to partners right up to the moment they decide to take total control. Will there be a Ballmer video chanting “Marketers!” soon?
Maggie, I do hope you’re not a member of the “If only MSFT had never existed, imagine how much more happy and productive Everybody would be” crowd
microsoft exists.
Cyber life is a matryoshka doll.
It gives me a chance to be nestled inside a smaller kinder, funnier matryoshka doll before being engulfed in the largest model.
Not really…such counterfactual speculation has low survival value.
But I probably should be counted amongst the “base your expectations of what MSFT will do in the future based on your analysis of what it has done in the past” crowd. “The horse might sing” is seldom a component of a winning strategy.
Bit snippy that last comment, but, maybe Microsoft recorded
their meetings at W&K. I think if they are serious about the advertising business then a re-listen to those tapes might help.
No, I’ve not got any stake in W&K, I go back to late 60’s CDP in London.