As Microsoft awaits a response from the Yahoo board on its $44.6 billion hostile takeover bid, Redmond showed that it is moving forward with new online advertising technologies it has already acquired.
At an event on Tuesday, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs demonstrated seven new advertising concepts including contextual video ads, image categorization and advertising analytics. Microsoft acquired aQuantive, an online advertising and technology firm, last year for $6 billion, its largest acquisition ever — until the Yahoo bid.
Previewing the demo, CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts Monday, “We’re in the course of building an online business, and an online business is typically advertising funded. That’s a new muscle, a new set of skills that we’re building.”
At Tuesday’s event, Tarek Najm, a technical fellow at Microsoft, said, “Solutions to today’s challenges must be capable of handling and understanding the complexity of vast amounts of data. To address that challenge, we are developing advertising algorithms that can anticipate and understand consumer behavior faster than the speed of thought.”
