By Matt Rosoff [bio]
Posted: Apr. 14, 2008

The following is a sidebar accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

The Advertiser and Publisher Solutions (APS) Group offers software for ad targeting by advertisers and publishers, and ad networks and exchanges to help sell ad inventory.

Atlas Software

Two Atlas tools were aQuantive's most profitable products, accounting for nearly half of its profits in its last quarter as an independent company.

The Atlas Advertising Suite helps advertisers and advertising agencies decide where to advertise and which types of advertisements (such as search, video, or "rich media" advertisements consisting of interactive elements or full-page overlays) they should use to reach desired audiences, as measured by size, demographics, and other factors. The Suite can also help customers create and quickly modify various types of advertisements, including video and rich media, and track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns consisting of multiple types of advertisements across many sites.

The Atlas Publisher Suite helps publishers manage their inventory—the advertising space for sale on their Web pages—more effectively so they can earn more money from advertisers. For example, the AdManager tool helps publishers track users through their sites so publishers can identify which pages will get the most traffic and can collect data on visitors to those pages, which advertisers are interested in knowing. The Mar. 2008 acquisition of Rapt will add new features to the Atlas Publisher Suite, such as demand curves for particular inventory (to help determine appropriate pricing) and a module to give advertising salespeople up-to-the-minute data on that inventory.

Atlas's competitors include DART for Advertisers and DART for Publishers from DoubleClick (acquired by Google in Mar. 2008), and OpenAdstream from 24/7 RealMedia (acquired by agency conglomerate WPP in June 2007).

Advertising Networks and Exchanges

APS also offers two online services to help match advertisers and publishers.

DRIVEpm. DRIVEpm is an advertising network that allows publishers to place relatively low-value inventory into a pool with similar inventory from other publishers. Advertisers can then buy space on all the pages in a pool, reaching users on many different sites with a single advertising purchase. According to Microsoft Chief Advertising Strategist Mike Galgon, DRIVEpm ranks behind Time Warner's Advertising.com and Google's AdSense in terms of reach, but ahead of ValueClick and other advertising networks.

(Google's AdSense works slightly differently than these other ad networks, relying on contextual analysis of page content, rather than publisher-provided information or user tracking, to place relevant advertisements. DoubleClick pioneered the idea of advertising networks in the 1990s, but sold that part of its business in 2002. It was eventually acquired by InterActiveCorp, or IAC, and renamed IAC Advertising Solutions.)

AdECN, a small company Microsoft acquired around the same time as aQuantive, is an advertising exchange, which allows advertisers and publishers to compare prices across advertising networks, leading to greater pricing efficiency. Microsoft compares it to the way a stock exchange gives a common place for market-makers—the companies that buy and sell large blocks of shares—to compare prices on those shares.

DoubleClick recently created an advertising exchange that works on similar principles. Right Media, acquired by Yahoo in July 2007, operates a slightly different type of exchange that operates like a network aggregator—in effect, instead of buying remnant inventory from publishers like a typical advertising network, Right Media buys unsold inventory from networks and sells that to advertisers.