On February 29th at the Mobile World Congress, our colleagues in Windows unveiled the long awaited consumer preview of Windows 8, which has been met with great excitement and industry acclaim. As I spoke about in December, Windows 8 is a major leap forward not only for the consumer experience, but it also presents a rich canvas that enables us to re-imagine the possibilities for creativity in display advertising.

Today we are delighted to release the new Windows 8 Advertising SDK Beta. What brand advertisers need to know is this: we are one step closer to utilizing Windows 8 capabilities to deliver new, engaging and immersive ad experiences that are relevant and add value to the consumer’s digital journey on Windows 8.

Within Windows 8 apps, advertisers will be able to utilize the interface as a rich canvas to tell engaging stories that put the consumer in the center of the ads in a brand safe environment. In the future, we will help brands create new advertising experiences that take advantage of touch with tilt, swipe and video enabled experiences. Our goal is raise the bar on what brand advertising is with ad solutions that delight, inform and enhance the overall consumer experience.

Today we are a step closer to re-imagining what advertising can be and I hope you share my enthusiasm for the future. We’ll continue to share updates on www.windowsadvertising.com as we prepare for the official launch of brand advertising on Windows 8 applications. If you’re a developer, Ian Ferreira who leads our Windows 8 ads-in-apps engineering team has provided additional technical insight on what the Windows 8 Advertising Beta SDK release means for you.

I look forward to having more to say on this soon. Stay tuned!

Jennifer Creegan - Microsoft Advertising