• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 11, 2007

Watch out, DoubleClick: Microsoft wants your most precious Web audiences.

Hungry for more ad syndication deals, Microsoft has convinced NBC Universal's financially focused CNBC.com to drop DoubleClick in place of Microsoft's adCenter platform.

This month, Microsoft will begin serving all contextual ads to CNBC.com and its 2.6 million unique monthly visitors, while the display ad end of the deal is expected to begin in March 2008.

Microsoft has existing third-party syndication deals with Facebook, Digg.com, and a photo-sharing social network named Piczo.com. But the addition of CNBC to its syndicated ad partner sites represents a big win--seeing how Microsoft has its sights on the lucrative financial services segment.

"This gives us the ability to aggregate an even greater pool of financially focused individuals for our advertisers," said Whitney Burk, a spokeswoman for Microsoft's advertiser and publisher solutions division.

Microsoft plans to package ad sales from its MSNMoney.com site with sales for CNBC.com. Its experience with financial services advertisers through MSNMoney contributed to CNBC's willingness to work with Microsoft, according to CNBC spokesman Brian Steel.

"We were interested in the opportunity offer our ad clients more targeted ad packages," Steel said.

Advertising is increasingly becoming a centerpiece of Microsoft's business strategy. In October, its chief executive Steve Ballmer said advertising would make up 25% of the company's total revenue within a few years. Ballmer's pronouncement came a few months after Microsoft paid $6 billion for advertising technology powerhouse aQuantive.

aQuantive founder Brian McAndrews, now Microsoft's senior vice president for advertiser and publisher services, is planning the broad execution of the companies' combined digital marketing services network to take on Google and DoubleClick (whether the Federal Trade Commission agrees to that merger or not.)

Through aQuantive's Atlas division, McAndrews and Microsoft plan to soon provide advertisers with logs of all the sites where consumers encounter their ads online, so they can more effectively plan their media spend.

It will be a combination of Microsoft's adCenter platform and technology from the aQuantive acquisition that will be driving ad sales on the CNBC.com site.

Since launching its adCenter hub last year, Microsoft has signed on roughly 100,000 advertisers, and plans to offer advertising throughout its entire product line. Firmly rooted in its history as a technology company--rather than an entertainment company--Microsoft this summer also opened a research center dedicated to online advertising.

In late October, Microsoft expanded its partnership with Facebook, winning exclusive global rights to sell third-party banner ads on the high-flying social network. Microsoft beat out Google in the deal, which also included a $240 million investment for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. Expanding the deal internationally was viewed as critical, because 60% of Facebook's nearly 50 million registered users are abroad.