The rise of omnichannel advertising represents one of the most significant shifts in the marketing landscape. With media consumption continuing to fragment across various channels and formats, and signal loss forcing brands to think differently about how they activate data, staying relevant becomes all the more challenging. For marketers and agency practitioners, the key lies in integrating storytelling across all audience touchpoints.

While Australia’s digital maturity ensures that we are at the forefront of advertising innovation, we also operate in an environment where such forward-thinking needs to deliver immediate benefits for advertisers. What we hear from clients is universal; achieving scale across fragmented supply is challenging, and this fragmentation makes it increasingly harder to have a unified view across their customer’s journey. Moreover, we hear a desire to find ways to unlock engagement and relevance in a world where the industry has shown a bias towards performance. And of course, marketers and agencies across the world are grappling with the question of how AI can unlock opportunities and improve the bottom line.

The search for incremental audience growth

As brands lean into omnichannel, their consistent presence through search, display, video, CTV and even gaming fosters a deeper connection with the audience. Our research shows that exposure to a CTV ad led to an 18 per cent rise in click-through rate on our Audience ads product and 9 per cent lift in brand searches. Our recent holiday-themed research also illustrated the power of deploying diverse ad formats across multiple channels to drive higher revenue.

Microsoft Advertising addresses this challenge by providing access to a vast and diverse audience. With over 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or 11, Microsoft offers a unique ecosystem that fuels audience engagement across multiple platforms, including Microsoft Edge, Bing, Outlook, MSN, Xbox and more. This extensive reach allows us to connect with high-spending users who are 20 per cent more likely to "add to cart" than on competing platforms.

Not all engagement is equal

However, just being in the right environment is no longer enough. Relevance through more personalised moments is required to stand out. The traditional, linear path-to-purchase is a relic of the past as audiences dive into new channels and formats to research, discover, do more and be entertained. And while rich, storytelling canvasses have always been a feature of a well-planned campaign, it is the ability to augment this with high value audiences at critical decision points across the open web that is helping advertisers stand out in a sea of sameness.

Our proprietary in-market audiences allow targeting across over 1,000 categories, built with rich behavioural intent signals from search and web activity. Additionally, impression-based remarketing across formats makes sequential messaging a reality, tailoring the right ads to your audience, guiding them in the right direction along their journey – whether they are searching, connecting, gaming, doing, watching, browsing or shopping.

We’ve long thought about entertainment as our path to deeper consumer engagement with TV, music and cinema providing durable, impactful environments for brand building. However, the dominant form of entertainment from a revenue perspective is gaming when you consider game purchases, downloads and subscriptions. With revenue expected to hit US$274 billion in 2025, it’s fair to say that clearly there is a large audience there. And for advertisers, the welcome news is that 48 per cent of gamers identify as female with the average gamer being 33 years old. The appeal of gaming is universal and the breadth and depth of our gaming platforms which include Xbox, Microsoft Casual Games and Activision Blizzard King mean it is easier than ever to tap into a thriving and engaged community of gamers.

AI: from promise to reality

Over the years, conversation has often focused on the pendulum that swings between art and science. However, thanks to the advancements of technologies such as generative AI and AI more broadly, it is no longer a case of picking between the two. This generational platform shift sees technology acting in service of creativity, helping us create more relevant and personalised messages, at scale, and guided by human intuition.

We see automation working in a variety of ways such as applying generative AI within our platforms to provide chatbot experiences, ad copy recommendations, AI-powered image creations, and new formats to offer you improve your capabilities and efficiencies. AI is also integrated into all our solutions to help you meet your goals and increase your performance. Here we are thinking about how AI can increase your audience reach, bring you greater relevancy and improved ROI, and how we can create more AI-powered optimisations and solutions to drive towards your marketing goals.

With generative AI, we’re reimagining user engagement, creating personalised experiences across our own premium, diverse and brand-safe platforms. And this extends towards our publisher partners with our Ads for Chat API allowing publishers to leverage Microsoft's technology to implement ads in their own chat experiences. This innovative solution enhances the chat experience by incorporating natural, relevant ads for audiences, providing publishers with a competitive edge in the market, and advertisers with new surface areas to reach their audiences such as Snap and Baidu.

As we navigate the future of advertising, it is crucial to embrace the opportunities presented by bringing together technology, media and audiences together to drive deeper and more meaningful connections with customers. We are deeply committed to helping advertisers and agencies navigate their way from complexity to clarity.