Transforming audience engagement with generative AI

Our work toward creating AI companion experiences extends from Copilot far into our ecosystem to services like Bing, Microsoft Edge, and MSN which will also be more personalized, visual, cohesive and useful experiences than ever before. For example, Bing’s generative search goes beyond simply finding an answer, instead using AI to dynamically generate curated, relevant answers. We began deploying these solutions across Bing on October 1 and continue to explore new ways in which consumers can more easily trigger Bing generative search for informational queries. To explore the topic of generative search, anyone can simply search “Bing generative search” to choose from a selection of demo queries.

Looking at the future of more engaging and useful digital experiences, we are also charting a course forward in how we are thinking about conversational advertising and adapting more ads to the specific context of each user and each moment. This will be achieved through more immersive ads that showcase product details in an increasingly interactive way and inform about deals from brands people follow. We expect that brands will create their own copilots--what we’re thinking about as brand voice--enabling Copilot to bring them to the conversation to aid consumers looking for product recommendations. While we are still early on this journey, it’s clear that the future holds tremendous potential for how brands connect with consumers.

Empowering advertisers with new generative AI tools

Microsoft’s goal is to make AI useful in people’s everyday lives, both at home and at work​. From Bing and Edge to Windows to Dynamics 365 and Azure, we’re working to redefine how people interact with all our products, and this includes our advertising platforms.

With Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform, we’re helping advertisers unlock productivity, unleash creativity, and uncover insights - ultimately uplevelling performance. Over the last year, Copilot has been helping users save time and augment creativity by assisting in writing or refining new marketing messaging. Additionally, using Copilot to compose images, videos, and banners has improved and multiplied creative asset variety, leading to improved optimization and personalization opportunities.

Today, we continue to innovate Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform in service of our customers’ top needs, by announcing two new capabilities:

1. Diagnostics: We hear from advertisers that quality assurance tasks, like ensuring campaigns launch properly and are running as expected, are time consuming. With this new diagnostics feature, Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform gives users an extra set of eyes to inspect campaign setup, assess account health, diagnose where attention is needed, and propose what to do next, all activated via simple conversational engagement. The diagnostics feature begins piloting this month and is the latest advancement in our commitment to saving advertisers’ time in the campaign management process while giving them peace of mind.

2. Performance snapshot: Advertisers have also shared a clear need for quick updates on how their campaigns and accounts have been performing since a prior point in time – since they last logged in, since last week, etc. With our new performance snapshot feature, an advertiser can use natural language to ask Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform to obtain an account or campaign-specific performance overview with a summary of key insights, trends, and anomalies. This feature begins piloting this month, gradually rolling out to all regions where Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform is available.

We will continue to innovate towards our vision of making it easier and faster for advertisers to access the information and insights they need by just asking Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform.

These new capabilities were developed in direct response to feedback in listening sessions with advertisers of all sizes and across verticals and geographies, and we have such gratitude for the partnership in co-creating the future of generative AI in advertising. One of these clients is dentsu, an early adopter of Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform. 

We continue to expand access to Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform’s powerful features for advertisers:

1. Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform’s capabilities are now live in 15 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, Filipino, Korean, Russian, Thai, and Turkish.
2. Advertisers using Microsoft Advertising Editor and Microsoft Invest now also have access to Copilot’s asset recommendation and asset creation features. Microsoft Advertising Editor users can unlock productivity and unleash creativity for their Performance Max, search, and Native ads, while Microsoft Invest users can now use these features for Native ads.

There is so much more to come. We will continue to build more capabilities for video and image generation, including the option to directly comprehend branding guidelines from advertisers. On the insights front, we plan to enable additional advanced campaign diagnostics and performance features across multiple campaign types. And finally, we will enable agency and technology partners to leverage our generative AI capabilities via API to enhance their own tools.

The time is now

We have come a long way since releasing ads in Copilot and pioneering generative AI capabilities for advertisers inside Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform. With todays’ announcements and our vision for a steady drumbeat of continued innovation, we invite advertisers to work with us as we drive the future together. Actionable gains are within your reach right now as we enter the shopping season:

• Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform can help save precious time during this busy holiday season, suggesting more occasional creative assets for advertisers to consider, refine, and adopt what they like. The better the variety of creative assets, the better the chances to increase relevance and personalization in your message to attract seasonal shoppers.
• Performance Max offers advanced AI optimizations that provide agility to identify opportunities in the context of a conversation, increasing the potential to be featured as part of Copilot conversations in a way that’s helpful to consumers. Our data shows that Performance Max boosts Product ads impressions on Copilot by 5x and improves click through rate (CTR) by 2x in comparison to traditional search. Similar data is observed across Performance Max ad types, including Multimedia ads and Responsive Search ads.

We will continue to listen to advertisers, of all sizes and AI maturity, as we co-create these generative AI tools around their needs. We can’t wait to collaborate and innovate on what’s next. In the meantime, check out the Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform page for more information.