Mike Grehan discusses his recent trip to China where he met with MSN Adcenter staff in his recent Clickz article: AdWords vs. adCenter: The Personalization Factor.
Grehan points out that Adcenter is much more advanced than Google’s Adwords in terms of precision advertising by allowing the advertiser to target gender, age range, geographic location, and more.
This SHOULD allow advertisers to get better results from their advertising.
From the advertiser point of view, I like it. But if I’m thinking of spending my dollars today, I know Google is where the traffic is at. I don’t want to spend a ton of time managing my Adcenter account if it’s going to result in fewer conversions.
So, I think for Adcenter to truly succeed, MSN Search needs to get a bigger audience share, and/or MSN needs to start a contextual network to compete with YPN and Adsense.
It sounds like Adcenter is going to be hitting China hard, which could be a very good plan if they can gain a foothold there before Google and Yahoo. It should be an interesting fight.