Google owns DoubleClick, a digital marketing technology and services provider while Silverlight 2 is a Microsoft product. What would you call an agreement sealed by both entities which happens to be the properties of competing major internet players? Nothing really, it’s just your plain business agreement which is aimed to be both beneficial for both parties.
And so let us as much as possible put no meaning to this recent agreement between DoubleClick and Silverlight 2 take it for what it aims to achieve. The agreement calls for DoubleClick to serve video ads on the Silverlight 2 environment. For DoubleClick, it’s part of an ongoing effort to help clients maximize their advertising inventory yield through various content, on both video and mobile channels.
With this agreement, DoubleClick’s clients such as NBC Universal Digital Media will be able to monetize video content that are played in the Silverlight 2 player. This is in time for NBC’s coverage of Olympics, giving video ads served by DoubleClick to get served anytime during the 2,500 video content running on Silverlight 2.
By working with DoubleClick to serve ads into Silverlight 2, NBCOlympics.com is able to leverage their existing ad operations workflow and staff to package video ads with other opportunities, such as online display and mobile ads. One platform for online display, video and mobile has made it possible for NBC to create compelling cross-channel packages for advertisers who want to reach the Olympics-viewing audience.
Fine, granting that it would be more beneficial and perhaps cost-effective for NBC to employ DoubleClick’s ad serving program on its video content running on Silverlight 2 platform, but one couldn’t help but wonder why Microsoft is not utilizing Silverlight 2 to serve video ads coming from its advertising inventory? Or why didn’t it not foreseen that viability of Silverlight as a possible avenue for serving ad inventory?
Microsoft has so wanted to catch up on Google in terms of its advertising business and yet it is letting Google to use even one of its product to push its video ads business. Perhaps, the Microsoft advertising team would want to look into this and explore the possibilities of utilizing Silverlight as one of its ad-serving platforms.
