In a word – Whoa!
In a bid to boost its presence in advertising, Microsoft announced Friday that it would acquire Aquantive, a digital marketing and services company, in a deal worth around $6 billion.
Microsoft said the deal would help it support more advanced advertising products and technologies across areas including media planning, video-on-demand and IPTV. Aquantive produces the Atlas Media Console and Drive PM tools for advertisers and publishers, and owns interactive ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish. [CNET News.com]
it’s been a pretty wild day. needless to say the seattle office is acting like this is the rapture and they’re the chosen ones. the NY folks are kind of “eh”.
What does it mean for you? You gonna be OK after the shakeout?
I think the Sr. Mgmt. set a record for instances of saying things will be “business as usual” and “nothing changes” (e.g. current recruiting initiatives, new biz pitches, etc.). If I were a betting man, I’d say M$FT would spin off AA-RF after the dust settles…because what, really, would they want with an interactive agency? They really wanted Atlas, the DCLK competitor, and some of the publisher-side products AQNT had (i.e. Accipiter). I bet AA-RF ends up with Omnicom or some major holding company that doesn’t have a high-profile interactive shop.
The divide between Seattle (official HQ of aQnt) and NY (the biggest office and biggest revenue generator) can’t be over-stated. I think everyone in Seattle has a long-held fantasy of being acquired by/working for MSFT, and now their fantasy is real. Most of the NY folks were amazed at the size of the deal, but underwhelmed by the fact that it was MSFT. Apple is a client of ours in SF, so that will be interesting to see how that turns out. More interesting will be seeing how this affects our relationships with Google, Yahoo, etc. That could get really dicey.