• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, May 12, 2010

In the afternoon keynote, Charles Johnson, general manager, mobile advertising at Microsoft previewed the company's new MSN home page optimized for smartphones and which goes live Thursday. The new home page sports a cleaner, more streamlined look on a white background and is tightly integrated via dynamic tabs with other Microsoft properties including its Bing search engine.

By maintaining a single mobile banner ad placement, Microsoft also aims to insure that ads are positioned to drive user engagement and awareness and avoid clutter. The higher response rates on mobile have been attributed in part to mobile pages running fewer ads than on the desktop Web. Whether Microsoft will also increase rates in connection with redesign is another question. Johnson pointed to the revamped MSN mobile site to highlight that Microsoft along with other publishers have to keep innovating and upgrading to maintain brand consistency across different platforms.