• Slate.com, Wednesday, November 11, 2009 2:15 PM

No wonder Microsoft was so willing to unload RazorFish on Publicis earlier this year. It turns out that in 2008 the digital ad agency only convinced its clients, including Visa and Victoria's Secret, to funnel 4% of their budgets to ads on Microsoft's Live.com search engine. In stark contrast, RazorFish's clients put 72% of their search ad budgets toward Google ads, and 22% toward Yahoo ads.

But, it wasn't RazorFish's fault, says Slate.com's Big Money blog. "Microsoft's search platform was so bad, its own ad agency couldn't entice people to advertise on it." Partly as a result, Microsoft has since inked a search deal with Yahoo and successfully launched a new search engine. But the software giant's smartest move, according to Big Money, was getting Publicis -- which paid $530 million for the agency -- to agree to a five-year initiative of ad placements on Microsoft sites like MSN and Bing.

Read the whole story at Slate.com »