Microsoft bags CNBC advertising

AS competition in the online advertising space ratchets up, Microsoft has announced it will start exclusively serving ads to the popular financial news site CNBC.

The competition between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo is turning into a land-grab for customers.

Google earlier this year announced its intention to acquire display advertising leader DoubleClick – which is still awaiting Federal approval – while Microsoft spent US$6 billion acquiring display online ad specialist aQuantive.

Microsoft will serve up contextually relevant advertising to the more than 2.6 million unique visitors to CNBC.com each month. Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party provider for both display and contextual advertising.

The companies said advanced technology would connect advertisers with CNBC.com users through a combination of graphical advertisments and automated text-based ads targeted to content.

Over time, the technology would also enable the anonymous aggregation of user behavior, the companies said in a statement.

“The addition of CNBC to our syndicated advertising partner sites will help the advertisers that work with Microsoft reach an even broader set of users in this highly strategic audience segment,” Microsoft Online Services Group senior vice-president Steve Berkowitz said.

Microsoft will start serving CNBC.com with text advertising later this month, and online display advertising in March next year.

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Feds approve Redmond online ads acquisition

MICROSOFT’s US$6 billion acquisition of online advertising firm aQuantive has cleared a major hurdle, receiving Federal Trade Commission approval.

Without the approval of the FTC, which governs anti-trust issues in the US and has overseen a decade of Microsoft-Government anti-trust clashes, the acquisition would almost certainly have been scuttled.

The FTC enforces a waiting period after a company announces an acquisition to review potential anti-competitive issues that arise out of large mergers.

But in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, aQuantive said the mandatory waiting period had passed without the FTC requesting any additional information.

A special meeting of aQuantive shareholders is now scheduled for the second week of August to vote on the Microsoft offer.

Like Microsoft, aQuantive is based in Seattle.

The acquisition was announced in May, just weeks after Google said it would pay US$3.1 billion for the online ad giant DoubleClick. Microsoft has complained that the Google/DoubleClick deal is anti-competitive.

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