Microsoft's Strategic Account Summit: Wooing Advertisers

Advertisers, well most of them anyway, want Microsoft to do well in media and to pose a tougher challenge to Google’s terrifying ascendancy. So perhaps it’s not a huge surprise that attendees at Microsoft’s Strategic Account Summit, which took place this week at Redmond headquarters, had mostly good things to say about the event.

“We’re always favorably inclined toward them,” David Smith, principal at San Francisco-based Mediasmith, told me today. “They’re somebody you want to win because of all their capability of bringing together the desktop and all the desktop tools toward digital advertising. It’s something you want to see be more seamless. It’s going to be a win for the consumer and the advertiser if they win.”

Of the Summit, Smith said, “It was a first class treatment of their advertisers and agencies. They had a world class group of speakers.”

He said advertisers in attendance had one gripe though — namely that the event was a bit too heavy on dazzling possibilities for the future, and light on the present realities of buying media from Microsoft. “The only downside is there were a few comments and, I’m inclined to agree, that it would’ve been nice to see some more stuff about what you can do with them today.”