Push has been awarded the Elite Channel Partner status by Microsoft Advertising. We are one of only 4 partners in the UK to have attained this status.
Elite Channel Partners get superior access to new Microsoft products and services, dedicated account management, deeper engagements with Microsoft engineering teams, access to research and the latest trends in consumer behaviour, vertical-specific insights and co-marketing investments.
This means that customers can count on us to help them grow and get amazing results by investing in Microsoft advertising. Despite Google’s unequivocal dominance, Bing still owns 36% of the US desktop search market. That’s a massive number of users your advertising isn’t reaching if you forget about Bing. You may be surprised at how Microsoft’s market share is increasing across the globe and in the UK the share has increased from 17% in 2015 to 22% last year.
Nigel Leggatt, Director of Partner Sales – EMEA commented that
“Thanks to the great work by Steve, Ricky and team, I am delighted to see Push Group achieve Elite status in the Microsoft Advertising Partner programme. Elite is our top programme tier and recognises the highest level of engagement, commitment and adoption of the Microsoft Advertising platform. Over the last 14 months, the Push team showed tremendous efforts to develop their sales & operations, fully embracing Microsoft Advertising into the fold, and maximizing value to their end customers. I am really excited to see how this partnership evolves from here”
Half of the users on their audience network are married or living with a domestic partner and 40% of the network is between 35-54 years old. We know our customers have key opportunities in these demographics and Microsoft is the perfect platform to reach such users who are searching for their products.
Ricky Solanki, Push CEO commented that
“We are delighted to have been accredited with Bing Elite Channel Partner status and we are committed to supporting our customer’s growth on the Microsoft advertising platform. We see customers getting significant benefits with less competition in Bing as well as reaping the rewards from audience targeting options such as Linkedin.”
Our team has just returned from Dublin having attended Microsoft Discovery Days and this proved the perfect time to celebrate Push becoming an Elite Partner and to network with the Microsoft team. We also had some key takeaways from the event:
- Consumer trust is everyone’s responsibility – We know that with every data break and fake news report, consumer trust continues to erode. Customers are increasingly becoming concerned about their privacy and data each day. Microsoft invests heavily in ethical AI technology to ensure privacy, security, transparency, and accountability.
- The future of the customer decision journey – Microsoft Advertising’s Marketing Director, Sean O’Connor, shared a fascinating study from Microsoft which showed how agencies and marketers use AI to improve engagement. The research found that 80% of the respondents struggle to use AI to better understand their customers’ decision journey and increase marketing performance. High performers shouldn’t wait to see what happens with AI, they are jumping in and seeing the incredible impact by leveraging chatbots, digital assistants and AI cognitive services.
- Reach more customers with Microsoft – Microsoft Advertising’s Product Director, Nitin Hegde, talked about how advertisers can reach audiences by using a wide variety of audience targeting options. This included unique capabilities, such as LinkedIn targeting, as well as utilisation of new rich ad formats (images and videos), as well as scale via automatic technology. Nitin also explored AI object recognition, which he said has opened the way for what Microsoft calls ‘Visual Search’. As a feature that’s currently live in Bing, visual search represents the evolution of search from the text box into the image in a much more interactive way which gives us more insight about what’s happening inside the pictures
- Creativity is more important than ever – Microsoft Advertising’s Head of Brand Marketing, Jason Miller, asked us to guess the one human cognitive skill that is guaranteed to increase in value as AI advances. And creativity was the answer! Jason spoke about how the last two years saw AI replicate more of the high-level ‘creative’ skills that we once regarded as distinctly human–from creating new paintings in the style of Rembrandt that is virtually indistinguishable from the artist himself, to even writing scripts for TV ads.
