Among the provocative insights provided by Microsoft's David Barlin, who works on Hotmail and instant messaging operations, was that company research shows that an integrated campaign involving search
and display ads can yield transactions some 22% to 56% of the time.
But he's convinced further research will show a campaign that uses display ads on Hotmail -- perhaps a takeover of
the in-box page -- and then follows it with an email send can yield even higher ROI.
The research effort -- testing what's termed "engagement modeling" -- is being led by Young-Bean
Song, who joined Microsoft from Atlas Solutions. Â