"It gives our advertisers more exposure to their users, and obviously help drives traffic to our users," said Robyn Rose, SuperPages' director of product and channel marketing. "MSN is really putting a high value on our local sales force as well. That's something they really don't have en masse--We have the relationships with the local people."
The ad unit populated by SuperPages' ads appears at the top of the results pages for MSN Local Search--which MSN launched last June. Rose said the ads are culled from SuperPages.com's list of local advertisers for the given geography and then selected by an MSN-developed algorithm. Pay-per-click and pay-per-call ads are selected first, and if there are not enough pay-per-performance ads available, the remaining units are populated with fixed-rate ads.
SuperPages' other distribution partners include WhitePages.com, 411.com, About.com, and MSN's biggest competitor, search giant Google.