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You may recall Microsoft acquired vendor marketing platform PromoteIQ in August as part of a larger focus on retail at the company. Well, we're starting to get some glimpses of what Microsoft PromoteIQ will be offering. The company said Thursday that it is building turnkey PromoteIQ integrations with the rest of the Microsoft stack.
PromoteIQ's integration with Microsoft Advertising is now in beta. Participating retailers can opt to open a portion of their advertising inventory to select brands via the Microsoft Advertising platform. This key here is that the retailers are in control of their programs — they choose the brands that can participate and can control the level of inventory and placements available to them. "Retailers don't want to be faceless supply that someone else is using to build an ad business," PromoteIQ's former CEO and now business lead Alex Sherman told me yesterday.
Conductor has launched Marketplace in its Searchlight platform. SEOs and marketers can request analyses, content briefs, educational materials and more from Conductor's team of success managers directly through the Searchlight UI. The aim is to make it easier to request managed SEO services and make SEO more accessible to marketers that may not have SEO in their title but are tasked with managing it. The offering is built into the existing tiered pricing structure for all customers.
As part of its EU antitrust agreement, Google agreed to give Android users in the EU a choice of a default search engine when they set up their phones. Which engines show up in that list was left to an auction process. The results of that search engine auction are now in and DuckDuckGo and Info.com will crowd out Bing in most markets.
Keep reading for a Pro Tip on third-party scripts and much more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief