Should Microsoft Have Bought aQuantive

Plenty of news over the past few days about Microsoft’s purchase of aQuantive and whether or not that impacts their willingness to continue pursuing Yahoo or other possible opportunities for them to get involved with in the future.

My question though is whether or not aQuantive was the right purchase. Granted, I no MBA or business major in general, but I’ve got to think there was probably some other, more rewarding options to purchase in the market than to plop down $6 billion for aQuantive.

I’ve read (and I can’t remember where now) that the purchase should be looked at as more of a “merger” than an acquisition or out-right purchase. 

According to this article though, Microsoft appears to be less  interested in the search results type of advertising and more interested in purchasing large chunks of audience types. Which sounds to me like purchasing large groups of complimentary demographic groups.

Microsoft isn’t giving up on search, Mehdi said; Microsoft is “absolutely commmitted” to remaining a strong competitor in that space, he said. But in Microsoft’s — and its advertisers’ — views, buying audiences, not pages, is becoming more of an area of interest.

“We believe we have the largest audience to monetize,” Mehdi said.

The largest audience to monetize comment makes sense but has it’s own challenges in my opinion. Microsoft in general is huge as we all know. From all the software opportunities, entertainment, operating systems and Office suite applications being used, Microsoft is literally everywhere, but do people see it? I kind of think Google seems to have more active eyeballs on them and what they do now, is that only because Google is the media poster child and Microsoft is the proverbial evil twin sister who’s only press is bad press in the mainstream media outlets?

Previously in the same article, a few of Microsoft’s recent purchases were highlighted and illustrates how they’re going after audiences and not just eyes. Among those listed included:

• Massive for in-game advertising
• TellMe for voice-activated search (ears instead of eyes?)
• MedStory for healthcare related audience
• MotionBridge and ScreenTonic for the mobile advertising audience

Maybe Microsoft knows what they’re doing still and doing things right. What do you think?