Online giants Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are taking advantage of Advertising Week in New York to release a host of new offerings.
Microsoft struck its first mobile syndication deal in the US by forging a new partnership with CNBC.com, part of Microsoft’s push to expand its mobile efforts in the US. Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party provider of mobile WAP site display advertising for CNBC.com’s mobile WAP site, http://www.m.cnbc.com/. This agreement is an extension of a partnership between the two companies collaborated for online advertising last December.
“It is our ambition to build a premium ad network for the mobile space in the US,” said Marc Henri Magdelenat, director of sales and marketing for Microsoft Mobile Advertising.
“We will not form partnerships just to expand our inventory, but will form strategic alliances with high quality publishers to keep the inventory relevant to our advertisers,” he continued.
The Ford Motor Company is one of the first companies to use the ads and will be running mobile ads for the Ford Flex vehicle across the network. Last week Ford began running these ads on Gannett’s USA Today mobile site through mobile vendor partner PointRoll. This expands the reach of the ads for Ford, as CNBC.com’s WAP site has about 1.1 million unique monthly visitors.
Advertising Week also brought about APT from Yahoo, a Web-based platform for buying ad inventory that is “designed to simplify the process of buying and selling ads online while connecting all the market players – publishers, advertisers, agencies, networks, partners and developers – from a unified platform to do business more efficiently and effectively,” according to a press release. The first publishers to sign up across the network are the San Francisco Chronicle of Hearst Newspapers and San Jose Mercury News of MediaNews Group.
In addition, AOL’s Platform-A has introduced BidPlace, a self-service marketplace exchange. BidPlace, which lets advertisers dynamically bid on and manage display inventory across Platform-A’s network, will launch in the first half of 2009. BidPlace will let advertisers submit bids for CPM, CPC and CPA advertising on AOL, certain partner sites and on Platform-A’s third-party network.
