Today’s Announcement with Adchemy: Advertising Beyond the Keyword

Today, we are pleased to announce an expanded partnership with Adchemy, an advertising technology company focused on making digital ads more relevant for consumers. In addition to taking a minority stake in the company, the expansion of our existing relationship with Adchemy will mean that we will be able to make their proprietary IntentMap technology available to qualified Microsoft adCenter customers. Previously, IntentMap was only available on a pilot basis to a few select adCenter customers. Although the initial phase will focus on our search advertising business, we see broader applicability in the future with our display advertising business.

Why is this important news?

It is important because it’s clear evidence that we mean what we say when we talk about pursuing innovation in the search and display landscape, and that we are committed to making advertising more relevant to consumers and more effective for advertisers. It is also important to note that today’s announcement brings us closer to our vision of creating deeper, more engaging advertising opportunities in general.

Search advertising continues to experience significant growth and accounts for the greatest share of online ad dollars. We understand that consumers are more and more focused on completing tasks and making decisions when they go online. We also understand a significant challenge for advertisers is that keywords inherently limit the potential of search advertising. Consumer queries may have the same underlying intent, yet the keywords consumers choose may not map to those selected by advertisers to represent a product. In order to take search advertising to the next level, we need to make the connection to consumer intent beyond keywords.

Our expanded partnership with Adchemy will complement our current services and tools and simplify paid search for Microsoft adCenter customers by helping them manage hundreds of intents rather than of millions of keywords. The Adchemy IntentMap works by grouping millions of keywords into tightly themed groups to maximize the relevance of both ads and landing pages, thus improving both the scale and impact of paid search campaigns on adCenter. This streamlined campaign management will drive more effective campaigns and higher ROI for advertisers and agencies by enriching the consumer search experience with improved ad relevance supporting their current task.

Over the past year, Microsoft Advertising and Adchemy completed a pilot that preceded today’s news. The success of this pilot is what prompted us to expand our relationship with Adchemy – both from a financial as well as commercial standpoint. The first phase of our expanded relationship will involve providing access to the Adchemy IntentMap to the top 500 Microsoft adCenter customers.

Continuous innovation is necessary to move the market forward. This expanded partnership will allow us to deploy Adchemy’s IntentMap in such a way as to help leading adCenter customers grow their business, which is, of course, our ultimate goal. Together we are confident this technology will improve adCenter campaign effectiveness and ad relevance at-scale, adding great value to not only to our advertisers, but to our own business, as well.

Thank you!

Rik van der Kooi, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Advertising, Advertiser & Publisher Solutions Group