Digital Media Buzz > Google & Microsoft: Top Ad Networks See Double-Digit Increases

Google & Microsoft: Top Ad Networks See Double-Digit Increases

By Ron Callari

When audience measurement service, comScore, released its ranking of the top 15 advertising networks among U.S. Internet users, Microsoft Media Networks US and Google were the only two tech companies that posted double-digit growth in 2009 over the previous year.

With a 31-percent increase year over year, Microsoft was the fastest growing ad network according to this analysis. When approached for this article, several executives indicated they “never comment on comScore studies,” and “Microsoft does not have information to share regarding this.”

Neil Strother, practice director for ABI Research, indicates that large players like Microsoft are often reticent about validating or debating these types of stats. So Strother helped DMB by sharing his thoughts on comScore’s stats. He believes that the reason for Microsoft’s success this past year was due to the company “integrating their network across their four platforms: PC, Mobile, Gaming and Digital TV.” This combined synergy helped tit focus and allowed advertisers to dip into any of the company’s media properties such as MSN, XBox, Windows Live, Office Live and others,” without having to strike separate deals with each entity.

Strother also feels that during “economic downturns, advertisers and brands “will seek out the larger networks like Microsoft and Google because they are perceived as ’safe havens’ to conduct their business.” In so doing, while total ad networks increased 8 percent year over year, Microsoft most likely obtained a portion of its increase from “a market share shift from some of the smaller players like ValueClick, Tribal Fusion and AOL Advertising.”

Additionally Strother notes, since all networks showed increases year over year except for Traffic Marketplace and the Adconion Media Group, “Microsoft also benefitted in general by the increase in digital advertising over traditional media,” particularly with legacy newspaper ad revenues estimated to have fallen as much as 12 percent in 2009.

Google, on the other hand, did share some insights regarding the comScore report. And while Rachel Nearnberg, Google’s global communications spokesperson couldn’t “speak to the data point increase [13 percent] listed in the report,” she could report some of the reasons for the growth they have been experiencing. Attracting top line advertisers is a main reason, Nearnberg notes. For the “last 12 months, 94 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers have advertised on the Google Content Network,” she says.

Google’s strategy is looking to help both brand and direct advertisers reach consumers through several innovative means. According to Nearnberg:

• Google has made recent improvements to its targeting tools on the Google Content Network to help advertisers match ad to content across the Web.
• Over the summer, Google launched contextual targeting that enables advertisers to focus on specific themes.
• Google launched view-through conversions in September 2009 to help advertisers better measure the impact of their display ad campaigns for those instances when an ad is seen, but not immediately clicked on.
• Google also launched a tool called Campaign Insights October 2009 to give advertisers reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness, or active user interest, in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign.

With the recent controversy in China whether or not Google will be pulling out of the country due to censorship issues and attacks on several of its users’ Gmail accounts, Nearnberg looks favorably on the future growth for Google and China. In another comScore study pertaining to the growth in the global search market, it showed China’s searches at 13.3 billion was second to the United States globally.

According to Nearnberg, “Asia [in general] has over 40 percent of the world’s Internet users and is an important region for Google.” Particularly in countries like China, “we’re excited about the opportunity for Chinese exporters to use Google’s ad tools to reach a global market.” She also adds that “the pace of mobile innovation in Asia is also extremely rapid, and mobile advertising is already a strong business for us, particularly in countries like Japan, which has a strong culture of mobile commerce.”

ABI’s Strother sees a “detente” eventually reached between the search engine giant and the superpower. With public critiques by Bill Gates and others who see this issue as overplayed in the media, Strother feels that both parties will acquiesce and over the long haul solve their differences behind “closed doors in quiet agreements.” According to Strother, “in the advertising space, there is too much at stake with wireless coming on very strong in China.”

While there are a lot of competing interests in play here and the world can applaud Google on taking the moral high ground, after the dust clears, this is “big business,” and Google will take all that into consideration in order to maintain its double-digit ad network increases in 2010.