Jerry Seinfeld is set to help Microsoft shed the “frustrated old geekster” image that Apple has so cleverly branded Windows users with through it’s ongoing series of “I’m a MAC, and I’m a PC” commercials.
A new advertising campaign of some $300 million from the software giant will feature, among others, Jerry Seinfeld, in a series of adverts with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (as if he’s not an old geekster himself). The tagline for the series, which will apparently add $10 million to Seinfeld’s kitty, is reportedly something along the lines of “Windows, Not Walls.”
Below is a parody of the orignal series of Ads by Apple;
The original series itself has spawned many a viral video on youtube.
An obscenity trial currently underway in Florida is highlighting the impact that search engines are having on the offline world. The defence team are using results gathered from Google to show the browsing trends of the community.
Whether the data is admissible in court or not is yet to be determined, however the salient fact is that the data collected by the major search engines is providing a more detailed shapshot of our lives.
“That’s why a lot of people are nervous about Google or Yahoo having all this data,” [Chris Hansen, lawyer] said.
For more information, see the New York Times Article
The far-reaching impact of cases like this come into play when looking at the Microsoft takeover attempts of Yahoo. Civil Libertarians are worried that the fewer the number of companies holding onto the data, the less secure the private viewing histories would be.
Microsoft has signed a deal with an up and coming start-up YuMe. The company specialises in serving in-video adverts and the deal with Microsoft will see them serving ads to online videos across Microsoft-owned web sites. The deal is another step by Microsoft in their quest to gain a bigger piece of the lucrative online advertising pie.
YuMe is the first dedicated video advertising network and ad management system built exclusively for the new world of Web video. With 400+ websites, more than 150 million video streams, and 46.9 million unique visitors, the YuMe network provides both audience scale and quality reach for advertisers.
More details in the press-release on the YuMe web site.
Microsoft has setup a deal with HP for distribution of Live Search on all HP PCs and laptops in an effort to combat Google’s deals with Mozilla and Dell.
As reported in MediaWeek, Microsoft has launched a new brand to encompass it’s expanding suite of products and services related to publishing and advertising. The announcement came on the 20th of May at “advance08″, which is Microsoft’s yearly event for executives from partnering brands and agencies.
The Microsoft Advertising brand, which will be pushed by the company’s advertiser and publisher solutions (APS) group, includes the ad serving tool Atlas, the ad exchange AdECN, the ad platform adCenter, and the in game ad firm Massive.
Brian McAndrews, Senior VP from Microsoft’s APS group also announced it has signed on companies including adidas, Coke and Paramount to begin showing display advertising on sites such as Hotmail and applications such as Windows Live Messenger.
Microsft has announced that it is walking away from it’s attempt to acquire Yahoo after raising their bid by a further US$5 Billion (around US$2 per share more than the original offer of US$31 per share). The raised bid was again rejected by Yahoo, stating that the increase to the offer was only half of what they considered to be reasonable to move forward. (more…)
The NY post has reported that Microsoft CEO - Steve Ballmer and CFO Chris Liddel have offered to sweeten the deal of the Yahoo! merge should Yahoo! formally accept the offer of entering formal negotiations. (more…)
According to an article on TechCrunch, although disputed as being completely inaccurate by Digg CEO Jay Adelson, the social news site is working with an investment bank on pitching the company for sale to large tech and media companies, and are said to be in talks with both Google and Microsoft - whom are both supposedly drawing closer to making their formal bids for the acquisition. (more…)
The New York Times reports that, earlier this week, Microsoft made a $1.2 Billion bid for Fast Search and Transfer, a search software company based in Oslo Norway. The company is not a competitor in the consumer search market at present, but rather they are specialist in the search technology used inside companies and government agencies to cull information from documents, databases and software applications.
The move by Microsoft, analysts predict, is primarily an effort to add more tools to it’s MS Office software suite, however with the recent launches of a range of online document processing services by Google this may also be aimed at fending off the competitions advances.
