What’s new in mobile ads? How can advertisers exclude ads from displaying in legacy browsers? What improvements are planned to make international advertising easier? When will Microsoft allow more negative keywords? When will adCenter provide a longer history of reports?

The brave representatives from paid search advertising at Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo were on the hot seat as questions flowed in from the audience of search advertising professionals during the panel session, Ask the Paid Search Reps, at SMX West on Wednesday.

Aaron Lauper, product manager for Microsoft adCenter; Frederick Vallaeys of Google Adwords, and Tomaso Pozzi of Yahoo fielded the questions during the late afternoon session.

The panelists were asked to explain what each company is doing to integrate search and display in the platforms.

Microsoft allows image ad buys through the adCenter platform and is opening up the content network for advertisers to display on a broader group of publishers.

Audience asked: What’s new in paid search for mobile?

Tomazo pointed out that Yahoo! will continue to invest in mobile ad models which will not be included in the Search Alliance with Microsoft.

Aaron explained adCenter users have had the capability for more than a year to create mobile ads, target by device category, and even to create mobile landing page for low-end devices when the businesses do not have mobile capable sites.

Audience ask: How are you addressing the hot topic of attribution for advertising?

It’s an ongoing point of discussion at Microsoft – how can the attribution be determined as the customer moves across multiple screens – Xbox, Windows Phone.

Audience asks: Can you target your ads by social interest or behavior?

At Microsoft, yes, we’ve started to enable targeting for behavior for 70 or so segments. Microsoft experience with targeting for display ads offers learning that the business is using to refine targeting for search and content ads.

Ask from the Audience: Will any of the search providers offer a paid listing in standard results?

As Aaron explained, the industry seems to be moving in a different direction – local search, video, blended search and so forth. Expect adCenter innovation to be in that direction, more likely than changing the standard search results.

Question from Audience: when will adCenter provide longer term reporting and accept larger negative keyword lists?

Look in the next release, coming soon.

These Q&A Panels are challenging for the panelists but it’s a chance for the product managers to gather feedback they take to the product teams. For the search providers, that’s a core value of events like SMX.