• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 29, 2021

Steve Sirich, general manager at Microsoft, who has spent 22 years at the company, will formally announce his last day on Thursday to pursue his passion for philanthropy.

As general manager of the Global Advertising Business, Sirich led the Microsoft Advertising Marketing team. His focus was to develop and manage the overall marketing strategy for the advertising business.

Sirich is not the only top executive working in advertising or search to leave the company this year. David Pann, former vice president of search at Microsoft, left in August to join LiveRamp as chief product officer (CPO).

LiveRamp announced Pann’s appointment one day prior to reporting its second-quarter earnings. Scott Howe, LiveRamp CEO, during the earnings call, touted the new hire.

A key figure in Microsoft's advertising direction, Sirich also helped to determine which solutions should be offered to Microsoft advertisers, identifying who Microsoft should target relative to its customer verticals, defining how Microsoft will reach its targeted customers, and influencing when Microsoft will roll out product offerings to advertisers, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In April, Sirich talked to Search & Performance Marketing Daily about Microsoft Parakeet for privacy controls and Bing API for search.

At the time, the company introduced a consumer data privacy proposal to the World Wide Web Consortium to assist the advertising industry. It addressed many concerns that advertisers have around data and Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox and Apple IDFA.

Parakeet (private and anonymized requests for ads that keep ethnicity and enhanced transparency), intended to help advertisers make the most of and build on the data strategy they have spent years developing.

Microsoft now is pushing zero-party data to promote trust and relevance in advertising -- defined as data that comes from people willingly.

Throughout Sirich’s career at Microsoft, he also took responsibility for guiding the sales, services and marketing integrations of Microsoft’s strategic technology partnerships with Yahoo and Nokia. He led the Consumer and Online division, which is responsible for helping the worldwide sales organization meet its revenue and customer satisfaction goals.

Sirich also led efforts to shape MSN’s global sales strategy around product monetization, sales process engineering and inventory yield management, and oversaw the sales, marketing, business development and product planning for MSN’s vertical automotive sector.