Before we open a new req at Microsoft, the recruiter sits down with the hiring manager and discusses the role, the business problem to be solved and where we might find this person. (Shocking, game changing, inside information I know, but bear with me… ). The reason I bring this up though, is that in my Advertising R&D -Development org, the problems we’re trying to solve sometimes have very little to do with the domain of Online Advertising.

Since the launch of Bing, we’ve seen steady growth in our search share and tons of positive feedback on the features and user experience. This is all goodness, but frankly, none of Bing’s accomplishments matter if we can’t monetize them. This is where the Ad Platform comes in. Now that we’ve redrawn the search battlefield, we have to deliver a “just as compelling” Advertising Platform to take advantage of all these new eyeballs!

To put it plainly, at 10% Search Market share we’re handling BILLIONS of transactions daily. In order to handle a 20 or 30% Market share, significant work is being done on the Scalability, Performance and Operability of our systems. These are common issues for any large, online, distributed platform development but a pretty far cry from Click Through Rates, Search Engine Optimization or other Online Advertising buzzwords. 

This perspective comes in handy when I read resumes and talk to candidates. Recently, I was on the phone with someone who was very passionate about Distributed Systems, dealing with high transaction volume and very large data problems. He wanted to develop features for computing on a massive scale and could not wrap his head around why I was trying to sell him on a job in Internet Advertising. I explained that figuring out how to scale our platform in a manageable way 100x is core to what several of the groups in Ads R&D Development are focused on. Not surprisingly, the conversation went much smoother the rest of the way!

Keep that in mind the next time you think of Advertising as Don Draper or Squeezing the Charmin!