Well, here I was waiting for news to officially cross the wire that Yahoo was acquiring Maven Networks for $150-$170 million (heavily rumored in the blogosphere yesterday and for weeks now) so that I could weigh in, when instead what emerged this morning was that Microsoft is making an unsolicited offer for Yahoo. Quite a day for Yahoo. (Note, I'll have more on Yahoo-Maven if and when that becomes official).

Today's big news is Microsoft's unsolicited $44.6B offer for Yahoo. Talks between the companies have been off and on for a long time, and it looks like Microsoft finally got fed up with the dithering at Yahoo and decided to make a pre-emptive move. Steve Ballmer's letter to Yahoo's board and today's release is here.

The deal is all about increasing scale to compete more effectively with Google in the online advertising space. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have lagged Google badly and have spent billions in the past year on ad infrastructure acquisitions. Yahoo immediately brings MSN lots of new traffic, which can be monetized with both search and display advertising.

Though Ballmer's letter also highlights "emerging user experiences" such as video, mobile, online commerce, social media and social platforms" down the list, as the fourth area of potential synergies, I would argue that the upside in video is actually the most strategic benefit of the deal. Why?

The concept of scale, i.e. being able to both reach gigantic audiences and drive massive traffic from them, is absolutely essential for broadband video advertising to become core part of the marketing mix for big brands. Unlike search-based advertising, which has been driven by long-tail advertisers, broadband video advertising is going to be driven by big brands. That's because, notwithstanding the growth of overlays and other formats, pre-, mid- and post-roll ads are going to be with us for a while to come, and they are expensive to produce. The average garage-sized business isn't going to be making them.

Big brands spend tens of billions of dollars on TV ads. Shifting a meaningful part of this spending to broadband delivery is essential for broadband's growth. Brands spend on TV because that's been the only way for them to buy enough audience reach. Though they're beginning to trickle some spending over to broadband, the central obstacle to increasing their broadband spending is that there simply is not enough high quality, targeted video inventory for them to buy in order to achieve their reach objectives and therefore materially impact their businesses.

This is a theme I hear all the time, and just heard many times in the ad-related sessions I attended at NATPE earlier this week. Microsoft knows that to tap the long-term broadband ad opportunity in branded video advertising, it must offer advertisers greater reach, along with interactivity, reporting, social features, etc. This is all the more urgent because MSN and Yahoo are already playing catch-up to YouTube which still drive approximately 40% of all video views, a dominant market position.

MSN has worked hard to cross-promote MSN video in the rest of the site, and this has driven improved user experiences and impressive traffic gains. Yahoo, which has been mired down with a dysfunctional and bloated bureaucracy, has been far less coordinated and effective in video, leaving lots of room for MSN to make improvements.

You won't hear much about video as a key motivator for the deal because Wall Street, which is Microsoft's key audience to persuade, doesn't give a whit about long-term strategic positioning. It only cares about short-term financial metrics like dilution, earnings growth, cost-reductions and so forth. But behind the scenes, I'm giving credit to Microsoft. I think it is reading the tea leaves correctly about how the broadband video ad market is going to unfold and how to get MSN positioned properly for long-term success.

What do you think? Post a comment!