Avenue A SVP: Microsoft + Yahoo = Irrelevant

Give credit to Avenue A SVP Jeff Lanctot, now a Microsoft employee (via the aQuantive acquisition), for not pulling punches in his interview with us. Instead of the usual blather about parent-sub harmony, synergy, etc., Jeff shot straight about what it's like to work for Microsoft while placing advertising across Yahoo, Google, and the rest of the web.

In short? It's a potential conflict of interest:

If our clients think for one minute that we are favoring Microsoft over AOL, we would lose that client tomorrow. Likewise if the MSN sales team is thought to be favoring us or providing us with information at the expense of other agencies or advertisers that business would go somewhere else. So, it's really high-risk for really no reward.

This certainly begs the question why Microsoft wants to own an ad agency. We suspect its eventual answer will be, "We don't."

The Lanctot straight-talk express didn't stop there, by the way. Worried about Microsoft+Yahoo together cornering the market on web advertising? Don't worry, Jeff says. Portals like MSN and Yahoo are getting less and less relevant:

There's a perspective that going from three portals to two is bad for buyers. But spend is actually moving away from portals and much more broadly across the web, so I'm actually not concerned about moving from three to two, because we are really moving from 3 to 800.