Microsoft India has appointed Ybrant Digital, an online marketing company, as its advertising sales house for the cities outside Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore, in a bid to expand to the following cities: Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Goa. This is in addition to Microsoft advertising's existing sales partner– AIDEM Ventures which will continue to look after sales in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, and Bangalore regions. It's worth noting that the big advertising hubs will remain with AIDEM. AIDEM, earlier known as NDTV Media, has been looking after sales for Microsoft Advertising, MSN, MSN Video, MSN Mobile for a while now. Its other clients include The Economist, e BUS, Live India and Sahara One among others. Following the tie-up, Ybrant will sell ad inventory for media properties owned by Microsoft including MSN, Windows Live, and Bing in the assigned cities. Besides proprietary media such as Lycos, Gamesville, getMedia in Latin America and several travel websites in Australia, Ybrant Digital claims to partner with global publishers such as Facebook, Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and Viacom, and says that it assists over 140 Ad Agencies including OMD, Carat, MediaCom, Group M, Quasar, Razorfish, Mindshare, Maxus, OmniCom and Oglivy, spread across Europe, the Americas and Asia. Over the past few years, Ybrant has acquired Australian ad network company Max Interactive, Israeli ad firm Oridian($13.5 million), US-based DW Net Ventures LLC / MediosOne ($4 million), Serbia-based Seenetix for its flagship bulk emailing product VoloMP ($2.2 million) and US- based Pennyweb Inc ($10 million) and Argentina based ad network DreamAd. The company had recently announced its intention to acquire a minority stake…
