MSN UK's Katie King proposes interactive models to appeal to advertisers

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Katie King is creative and Development editor of MSN in the United Kingdom. She gave an overview of MSN UK, in which she mentioned that it was the most popular portal in the UK. Everybody there uses hotmail, for example. She also said they’re based in London, so they have a team of journalists that can go out and cover the city. And she highlighted it’s important to know that MSN really does do news. When something breaks, they either blog or cover it.

She mentioned she’s responsible for an advertising product MSN has been creating in the past year. They’ve focused on video, blogging, twitter, and other social media. They have a staff of 35 people.

“Everybody of the 25 people we have there are blogging,” she said.

All staff members have a twitter feed and it’s gathered in one page. This provides information to the community, which they can use to develop a conversation. The impact of this is the communities being developed.

“There’s been a big, big, big focus on video for us on the last years,” King said.

They’re very interested in engaging the audiences, and the advertisers too. She discussed an Ad-Funded Creative Solutions, which consists of engaging and informing users on behalf of their clients. They’re experts at creating quality of content and valuable information, and it’s an interactive branding experience. When talking to advertisers this is what they bring up.

King also mentioned they keep a close track of their audiences. They make corrections, react to people’s comments, etc. The value they provide for the clients and the users is a focus on top SEO, quality editorial content, successful performance metrics, cross-platform across mobile and chat spaces, the ability to target audience, and connect to audience through web 2.0 functionality. For advertisers, this provides a clear model that tracks what’s working and what isn’t in a campaign.

Her closing quote was: “Do what you do best and link to the rest,” as Jeff Jarvis says.

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