Microsoft has announced that they have acquired Rapt, a "provider of advertising yield management solutions for digital media publishers." This will help Microsoft to provide "integrated asset and inventory management, forecasting, yield and sales management, and ad delivery and operations" through the Atlas Publisher Suite. Ah, the smell of buzzwords in the afternoon.
What does it really mean? Microsoft is expanding its offerings for ad management to digital media publishers. Rapt's tools help publishers manage their ad creative, click through, price and other data to help publishers understand where they are and where they should go from there. Microsoft will obviously integrate these tools into their publishing platform, which may help to give them an edge in appealing to advertisers. Microsoft already offers a number of tools for other advertisers through their AdLab and their Excel Add-in. We'll still have to see if this is enough to bring them a bigger market share of advertisers.
Why are advertisers so important? It seems as though they've become the road to success in search-the more advertisers you have, the more revenue you have and the more advertisers you'll be able to get.
In other news, Chief Media Officer Joanne Bradford will leave Microsoft for a position with SpotRunner, a TV advertising startup that is branching into other media and recently acquired Weblistic.
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