Earlier this week, Microsoft announced they would be taking over AOL Search and shifting some parts of its advertising work onto both AOL and AppNexus, an online advertising company.
Bing will now power search and search advertising across the AOL portfolio of sites, which includes Huffington Post and TechCrunch to name a few.
AOL also will become Microsoft’s seller of all display formats—including mobile and video—across nine major markets (Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States).
Furthermore, AppNexus now becomes Bing’s exclusive programmatic technology and sales partner in ten of its European markets (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland).
One might be led to believe that this expanded partnership shows a more aggressive pursuit of access to advertisers in Europe. And, that the closer ties with AOL (owned by Verizon) aids in their validation of Bing across more platforms. Just sayin’.
We’re very curious to see how this changes what advertising appears on AOL. As we’ve seen in past iterations of our Report on the State of Branded Keywords, AOL typically shows far more trademark bidding than Google, despite pulling ads from the same search network. When it becomes powered by Bing, will it show the same amount of trademark bidding? Stay tuned.
