Internet Advertising Deals

Two recent deals continue Microsoft’s expansion into online advertising: Microsoft has agreed to acquire online advertising exchange AdECN, and has signed a deal to sell advertisements on content-recommendation service Digg. Both deals highlight the drastic change to Microsoft’s online advertising role: instead of being a publisher that sells advertising primarily on its own sites, Microsoft will provide a wide variety of tools and services for other publishers and advertisers.

AdECN Acquisition

Founded in 2003, AdECN is an online advertising exchange that attempts to make the process of buying and selling online advertisements more transparent.

With traditional online advertising campaigns, an advertiser (or, more commonly, the agency representing it) works with a particular publisher or online advertising network to create a campaign. The process is time-intensive for both parties, and advertisers can end up paying for undesirable inventory that was attached to the order to meet the publisher’s business goals, while publishers spend more time taking orders and assembling packages than they do managing strategic relationships with their advertisers.