Mike Ru is senior manager for Microsoft’s brand, advertising, and research group. In 2020, he oversaw marketing efforts for the company’s large and fast-growing cloud computing and services business, Azure. Last year saw a huge growth for the cloud computing market driven by the growth in areas like home learning, remote working, and streaming entertainment. This contributed to Microsoft’s revenue for this part of its business, growing 50% to $14.6 billion in Q4 2020.
Working for the company synonymous with spreadsheets, it’s no surprise that Mike keeps a close eye on every dollar of ad spend and wants to know the return on investment (ROI) it generates for the business.
In Mike’s own words: “I run an ROI-driven campaign, where I’m evaluating every dollar I spend based on the estimated revenue [it will] generate for Microsoft. But that ROI is constantly changing in real time, driven by changes in customer behavior [and] changes in media costs in the marketplace. I want to be able to jump onto opportunities as they surface and divest out of tactics as soon as their performance declines. However, sometimes those windows are very short or difficult to identify manually with human observation. So […] tactics that are data-driven and leverage machine learning have become big bets for me.”
This is where Quantcast’s AI and machine learning engine Ara™ comes into play. Ara ingests real-time data from more than 100M online destinations, enabling Quantcast to deliver actionable insights to our clients second-by-second as well as drive progressive improvement on campaigns.
Mike continues: “Quantcast [is] equipped to address those challenges, mainly because I’ve seen it’s proven its ability to ingest and process web signals and build sophisticated targeting for me, and it leverages machine learning on top of that to drive progressive improvement on campaigns. Another reason [for working with Quantcast] is I lead a global campaign and, while I focus on a specific set of audiences that are fairly universally defined, the way audiences are targeted and the way inventory is bought could be very different, depending on the country in the market.”
With rapid changes in advertising technology, innovation and close partnership with clients is essential. Mike agrees that “Quantcast is always looking for ways to push the envelope” and “the people at Quantcast feel like an extension of my team.”
Check out this short video to learn more how the Microsoft Azure marketing team leverages Quantcast’s unique real-time data to connect with their global audience to drive measurable ROI.