Just because Microsoft says that it won’t allow advertisers to data mine its Xbox Live base, doesn’t mean that marketing teams across the board aren’t chomping at the bit in order to get a piece of that pie.
Yusuf Mehdi, corporate VP of marketing and strategy at Microsoft, spoke at the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing Conference and made statements that seem to put him directly at odds with Albert Penello, director of product planning at Microsoft, who said this data would not leave the console .
Mehdi states: “We are trying to bridge some of the world between online and offline. That’s a little bit of a holy grail in terms of how you understand the consumer in that 360 degrees of their life. We have a pretty unique position at Microsoft because of what we do with digital, as well as more and more with television because of Xbox. Its early days, but we’re starting to put that together in more of a unifying way, and hopefully at some point we can start to offer that to advertisers broadly.”
If Microsoft would like to know why it continually has to put out fires in the gaming community regarding privacy, it should really look at the attitude of its advertisers. It’s clearly a hard sell to gamers when Microsoft pushes one mentality that is clearly contrary to the way its marketing partners would approach the console.
Of course, the guys at Microsoft are ultimately the gatekeeper of what is shared and what isn’t, so for now we have to just take their word and trust them. For now…
Souce: Advertising Agency