• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 26, 2010

Hoping to help consumer packaged goods brands better reach their targeted audience, Microsoft Advertising has tapped comScore and its Audience Advantage platform.

Specifically, the software giant is counting on the platform to help CPG brands -- including Campbell Soup Company and Alberto Culver -- to reach audiences across its own online properties, including MSN and Windows Live.

While Microsoft has an existing relationship with comScore, it will be the first to use the Audience Advantage platform for the CPG industry. The platform will be used for anonymous audience modeling and reporting to improve the effectiveness of ad delivery for its customers.

Microsoft Advertising developed a CPG Online Effect product last year as part of its Microsoft Media Network. It relies on behavioral models, which combine data that measure offline and online purchase behaviors.

Per the partnership, this product will plug into the Audience Advantage platform to better explain how online advertising campaigns can impact offline sales.

"Given their offline and online panel size and their research capabilities, comScore was a key industry ally for Microsoft's CPG Online Effect solution," said James Colborn, Microsoft advertising director.

"Our combined solution will help not only deliver more relevant audiences to advertisers, but will also enable us to measure the lift in offline sales in an insightful way to help advertisers tweak or improve existing campaigns and their future media plans," Colborn added.

The Audience Advantage platform combines shoppers' actual in-store purchases made with loyalty cards with their online attributes -- such as purchase behavior, geographic data, site visitation and search activity -- to anonymously determine which visitors to a Web site are most likely to purchase a particular brand or product in a retail store.

After an ad campaign has been anonymously implemented on Microsoft's Web sites, CPG advertisers can leverage comScore's 350,000-person database of Internet users who participate in supermarket loyalty card programs to measure actual in-store sales resulting from the campaign.