Online Media of the Year: Search No. 3 MSN

Category: Search site

Owned by: Microsoft Corporation

Founder: Bill Gates

Chairman and CEO: Reed Hastings

General manager Asia: Grant Watts

Marketing manager: Yvonne Tey

MSN.com is one of Microsoft's most attractive offerings, drawing a global audience of 465 million unique visitors with its winning combination of information presented in a clean, visually arresting manner placed alongside Microsoft Live powered search engine MSN Search.

Microsoft's MSN Search jumped onto the pay-per-click advertising bandwagon only two years ago alongside Yahoo Overture and Google Adwords. At the time, industry watchers wondered why MSN took thus long to take its advertising program in-house when its direct competitors had done so long ago.

It's a classic case of better late than never. Across Asia Pacific today, the MSN/ Windows Live network offers advertisers an audience of over 75 million while MSN's search engine accounts for one in five web searches, putting it in 3^rd place behind Google and Yahoo. This statistic is consistent with the portal's performance in the search site category where it was ranked 3^rd with 9.74% of votes from all respondents. The site was also consistently ranked 3^rd by majority of respondents across all categorical divides, be it by company of origin, respondent origin, region of responsibility, gender or agency/client divide.

Although MSN was the preferred choice by ten times more respondents of local origin than respondents of foreign origin, marketers with regional responsibilities definitely trusted MSN more than marketers with local responsibilities. 111 of respondents with regional responsibilities voted for MSN, as compared only 56 respondents with local responsibilities. Unlike its competitors Yahoo and Google, MSN registered an almost equal number of votes from male and female respondents, suggesting that it has struck a perfect balance in the design of its site and content in attracting audience of both genders.

MSN was given more votes by client-side respondents (92 votes) than agency-side respondents (72 votes), garnering the highest number of votes from respondents performing media buying and account servicing functions on agency side. The website also garnered the highest number of votes from respondents performing marketing managerial and CEO functions on the clients' side.

MSN was least popular with respondents performing creative and public relations functions on the agency-side, and respondents performing brand/product managing functions on the clients' side. By industry group, MSN was the most popular with respondents from creative advertising agencies, followed by respondents in the I.T. and telecommunication and consumer products sector.

Locally, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solution reaches over 50% of audiences in Singapore below the age of 25, aided by services like MSN Today, MSN Hotmail

And most notably, popular instant messaging service MSN Messenger which boasts over 1 million active Singaporean audiences. Local advertisers have become increasingly aware of this fact; hence MSN''s recent clients range from local university Singapore Management University, to Pizza Hut, to local radio station 98.7FM and Golden Village.

Along the agency/client divide, MSN enjoyed marginally more support from agencies than from clients. Nothing much can be said of survey respondents' preference of MSN by job function as both agency and client-side respondents voted fairly equally across the board whatever their job functions. Just like in the search category, MSN had more support from respondents with regional responsibilities than from those with local responsibilities.  Last but not least, across industry groups, MSN was the most popular with respondents from the creative, media buying and I.T and telecommunications sectors.