Posted on 10/31/2014 9:14:04 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Microsoft has made its entire global advertising sales team redundant, sources have told Business Insider.
The layoffs — within the Microsoft Advertising division — are expected to affect around 100 staff across the US, UK and other global offices, charged with selling advertising space across Microsoft's MSN, Bing, Xbox, Outlook, Skype and Windows 8 properties.
Sources have told Business Insider it was announced Wednesday. Microsoft was making its Microsoft Advertising global sales team redundant as part of the largest ever sweep of job cuts in Microsoft's history announced this summer, which is understood to affect up to 18,000 roles across the entire business.
One client-side marketer told Business Insider their company had a campaign lined up with Microsoft, only to be informed its account managers at Microsoft Advertising had been told to down tools earlier this week.
A Microsoft spokeswoman told Business Insider: "We've taken another step that will complete almost all the 18,000 reductions announced in July. The reductions happening today are spread across many different business units, and many different countries.”
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I don’t understand this. Do they not need to advertise now?
Does seem a bit odd. Apple has routinely killed them with their OS, etc. MS is seen as a dinosaur and becoming the Yahoo of Search Engines. But still . . . a bit surprising.
“I don’t understand this. Do they not need to advertise now?”
This article concerns the sales team that SELLS web ads on bing and the like, NOT purchasing ads for their products on TV and the like.
If this article is true, then it would essentially mean Microsoft is completely giving up on competing with google for web ads across all of their platforms, or they are going to outsource the web ads sales function.
Quite likely.
the latter, I would bet. It’s pretty easy to make the case that selling ads on Bing, etc is not something Microsoft needs to do in-house.
Microsoft’s advertising was historically so bad, I would have fired them all for incompetence.
That could be it
They went traditional media for their Surface Pro 3 ads and it actually worked for them
I wish they’d fire the Microsoft techs who keep calling me to “fix” my system. Oh, wait, they’re fake. I’m just sick of getting the calls at all hours.
They’re going to re-hire them. It’s Microsoft’s way of “turn it off and then back on again”.
The way I read this is that it’s part of the 18k cuts already announced last summer, not new cuts just announced.
This isn't necessarily the sales department's fault, but remember this?
Because they couldn’t sell stinky windows 8?
This also had something to do with the Windows 8 disaster.
I remember that room! It was installed on my first PC if I wanted to use it, but I couldn’t think of any advantage to be gained by doing so.
Kind of like that stupid paper clip that pops up in Word and says “I see you’re writing a suicide note. Would you like some help?”
good lord
That is just painful to see
bump
They should have fired all the morons that conceived of and produced Windows 8.
why? the only downside is the tiles desktop. everything else about it is an improvement over 7.
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