Facing a softening market for online advertising sales, Microsoft has announced MSN Advantage Marketing, a US$100 million effort to generate more advertising for MSN. MSN Advantage Marketing consists of two partner programs to help advertisers use MSN more effectively. The Premier Partner Program, targeted at Fortune 500 companies, will include exclusive MSN marketing opportunities, such as cosponsorships and sweepstakes, along with other Microsoft offerings such as Passport and the .NET Enterprise Servers; Microsoft Consulting Services will help Premier partners tie these components into complete sales and marketing solutions. The second partner program, MSN Agency Alliance, will provide advertising agencies with training about MSN's next-generation advertising technologies and formats, proprietary market research, and alerts about new cosponsorship opportunities; these agencies, in turn, will promote these opportunities to their clients. MSN Advantage mimics similar programs from other big-name sites: for example, Yahoo has sponsored educational summits for advertising agencies to promote its own advertising technologies. For general information, see advantage.msn.com/MSNSALES/Home/Home.asp. To contact an MSN ad representative, see advantage.msn.com/MSNSALES/ContactUs/ContactUs.asp.