Microsoft Advertising Releases Technical Preview of Advertising SDK for Windows 8

Yesterday, my colleagues in Windows shared the monetization opportunities that will be available for developers within the Windows 8 app ecosystem (link below!). One of those opportunities will be the ability to advertise in Windows 8 apps. As you can imagine, we are pretty excited about the opportunity and potential this brings to app developers and marketers! In preparation for this new ecosystem, I’m pleased to announce that the technical preview of the Microsoft Advertising Software Developers Kit (SDK) for Windows 8 is available for download. Ian Ferreira from our ads engineering team has shared what this means for Windows 8 developers; and what I’d like to do now is share my thoughts about the world of new possibilities this opens for advertisers. (Visit Windows Store for developers)

Today’s news means that within Windows 8 apps, advertisers will have the ability to tell their stories in a beautiful environment, that is focused on the consumers’ needs for enhanced safety, in a scalable way. Within Windows 8 apps, we will deliver a variety of advertising formats, from basic text ads to rich and immersive new advertising experiences that make the best use of Windows 8’s capabilities.

In addition, the Microsoft-enabled ads in Windows 8 apps will be “polymorphic.” When we use the term polymorphic, we are using it literally (multi-shaped) and symbolically at the same time. Polymorphic advertising will enable advertisers to submit creative assets once, choose functions that are right for their story and unique for each screen and then easily scale those assets across the entire digital campaign. You can read more details about polymorphic advertising and how it allows advertisers to tell multi-screen stories in my blog post from Advertising Week.

At Microsoft, our goal is to help advertisers engage consumers in new and innovative ways that are relevant and that work well within the context the consumer is engaged in. We’ll continue to share views of upcoming advertising experiences in the coming months.

We’ll be using this www.windowsadvertising.com site to share more details for how you can advertise within Windows 8 applications as well as sharing information about the various features we plan to roll out in the future. Stay tuned!

Ads within a news app concept:

A conceptual view of what an ad within a “news” app on Windows 8 might look like. As you see, the ad fits seamlessly in the app template experience.

When user taps on the ad, the ad expands opening up a variety of ways to interact with the ad content. The user can learn more or even purchase directly from the ad within the news app.

Ads within an article concept:

An example of an ad within a magazine / newspaper article. The ad is relevant to the article and the user. In this case a movie enthusiast can tap the ad to discover more about the movie Rio.

Tapping on the ad takes the reader into an immersive experience where they can watch a trailer, play a game, or download a wallpaper, all while staying within the app experience.

Tap the ‘Games’ tab and now user can shake the tablet to slide the birds, tap, swipe and bounce … get in the game! The user can simply touch the orange bars to get back to the app at any time.

Jennifer Creegan – Microsoft Advertising