Microsoft marketing team to log in to Dubai

Microsoft is setting up an advertising and marketing team in Dubai, that would oversee the region's operations along with Linkdotnet, a subsidiary of Orascom and Microsoft's partner of six years in seven markets across the region.

However, talking to Emirates Business, the company representatives said it had no specific plans, including acquisitions or partnerships, to develop Arabic content for the region.

Aubrey Edwards, General Manager, Consumer and Online International, Microsoft, said: "In addition to our partnership with Linkdotnet, we are going to add people to our team here locally. We do have the Microsoft office in Dubai Media City, but in terms of advertising, we are adding some people to our Middle East and Africa team to help build the market and work closely with our partners."

Meanwhile, Ahmet Burak Gokmen, Area General Manager, Consumer and Online, Microsoft Middle East and Africa, said: "We are trying to increase the relevance of MSN Arabia and our MSN business in the region. MSN Arabia, as you know, has both English and Arabic sites. For this market, the English site is visited probably twice as much as the Arabic site."

He said: "We may not have anything specific on the acquisition side, but we are talking with our partners to increase the relevance of MSN for each market and make more of local content from each market. We are working on further customisation of MSN Arabia for the regional markets, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, adding more relevant local content to attract more attention of users. Yet, we are open to grow this market and grow the local content side by side."

Gokmen said: "In terms of Arabic content, we know that there is not enough today, and that competitors are way ahead but still if we look at numbers, Arabic content is still not enough, and it might be one of the reasons why search engines are not growing in terms of advertising as much as is expected.

"In this regard, we monitor the growth of a lot of the entrepreneurial activity in the region, especially in markets like the UAE, Jordan and Egypt. Those entrepreneurs have better business cases in terms of how they make revenue and will eventually be the ones to drive more Arabic content. User-generated content is also crucial to the growth of online Arabic content. With our tools and new services such as Windows Live, which includes social networking and content-sharing platforms, we enable users to have more local content on the web."

In the meantime, Microsoft's team is currently hoping to reinforce its presence in the region, by talking to advertisers and agencies to push its proposition that marries its server technologies and its digital media assets.

The company organised a meeting yesterday with stakeholders titled "Microsoft Advertising Summit".

Gokmen said: "We have had business in this market for a while now, but we see that the growth in online advertising is going to accelerate much more than it is today, so we want to be here to drive the growth."

Edwards said: "We will work with partners and we will be present here as well. Our meeting with agencies and clients is intended to look at the trends in marketing. We realise that marketing is becoming more and more complex, as traditional marketing starts to lose its grip on delivering brand messages, while consumers' expectations grow higher. It is becoming more difficult to attract the consumers' attention and their presence is divided among many platforms such as mobile, radio, TV and internet.

"We believe that with our media and technology approach, we are able to offer marketing solutions, that use various combinations of media to deliver brand messages. That is where we can play a role and we see a lot of opportunity in it."

According to Edwards, Microsoft currently provides a platform for advertisers mainly in the telecommunications, electronics and automotive segments.

In terms of search advertising, Edwards said that Bing, which is currently on Beta version in the region, is expected to see good growth.

"We have no timeline for when Bing will come off the Beta version in the region. Obviously, Bing was fully launched in markets such as the US, the UK and Canada," said Edwards.

He said: "We realise it is a long journey for Bing and we do not expect it to jump from eight per cent market share to 40 or 60 per cent overnight. However, we have gained 3.8 market share since the launch… that is obviously taken from other players."

Microsoft has its search alliance with Yahoo, which would start to see a combined market place of search come together across the next two years, said Edwards. "That will see some fair increase in query share and market share. In the US, for example, Yahoo has 17 per cent and Microsoft has 11 per cent. The combination will mount to about 28 per cent – nearly a third of the market will be on Microsoft-based technologies."

While MSN is rated as the top site in the region for the amount of traffic, according to Ikoo, Edwards said Microsoft was "doing a great deal of work to differentiate Bing and drive some innovation to the users experience. We know from our research, user focus group studies and usability tests, that on traditional search engines, 50 per cent of queries don't provide a satisfactory result.

"So we have started innovating the users' experience, focusing more on building a decision engine rather than a search engine."

MS factsheet

- Microsoft's worldwide unique visitors increased by more than 19 million quarter over quarter in 2008

- Microsoft's worldwide unique audience has increased eight per cent year over year

- Microsoft has a user base of 688 million people worldwide, growing 21 per cent year on year

- 17 per cent of all time spent online globally is spent on Microsoft's web properties and services

- 590 million MSN Windows Live users per month worldwide

- 225 million Bing users per month worldwide

- Windows Live globally has: 346 million Hotmail users; the top e-mail service worldwide; 327 million Messenger users; the top messenger service worldwide;127 million Windows Live Profile users; and the third most popular social networking site worldwide

- Users are focused more on tasks and decisions: 66 per cent of people reported using search engines to make decisions, and long sessions are becoming more common, with over 46 per cent of searchers' time being spent on sessions over 30 minutes in length

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