"There are few companies in the world today that command as much respect as Microsoft," said Peter Hershberg, Managing Partner of Reprise Media.

"Our team is incredibly honored to work with such an exciting portfolio of brands and products – from Office and Vista to the Zune. We’re inspired by the challenge of taking Microsoft’s search efforts to the next level."

Reprise Media was recently purchased by Interpublic, whose McCann WorldGroup acts as Microsoft’s global agency of record. The two companies will work together to create an integrated, cross channel search strategy for Microsoft.

"In Reprise Media, we are confident that we have found a partner that really understands Microsoft, can enable the integration of search into the broader media mix and will provide strategic guidance on the search channel at an enterprise level," said David Grubb, Global Media Director at Microsoft.

"They have had a visible impact on our efforts already, and we’re just getting started – a testament to their deep expertise and innovative approach to search."

Reprise: Small Budgets Pay More With Panama

The report by Reprise found smaller Yahoo Panama clients, with budgets under $40k, experiencing an unwelcome trend. Reprise said that those clients saw CPCs increase by 5.7 percent.

This would be due to the quality-based bidding system Yahoo implemented with Panama. Revamping the paid search platform brought it more in line with how market leader Google does business. It also raised costs for smaller marketers.

Compared to Google and MSN’s adCenter, Yahoo’s CPCs declined from January to March 2007, while increasing at both Yahoo competitors. Reprise attributed that to the bidding change and to “more sophisticated and granular campaign structure” for Yahoo search marketing efforts.

Reprise was pleased to see click-through rates rise to match those it receives from the Google campaigns it conducts. However, a 5 percent drop in conversions from January to March tempered that good news; Reprise suggested this could be a normal variance, in which case conversions remained flat with Panama’s launch.

On the campaign management side, Yahoo has some work left to do. Reprise criticized the reporting capabilities in particular, calling their fixes a “cosmetic upgrade” that is “slow and inflexible compared to Google.”

Smaller clients of Panama will want to consider the warning Reprise offered regarding CPCs and managing campaigns:

Large marketers and agencies that have expertise in properly using all the campaign structure features provided are benefiting from the upgrade. Smaller marketers who either don’t have the budget to properly use these features or who are not taking advantage of the hierarchical account structures will not see these campaign optimization benefits and may actually see decreases in performance because they are competing against others who have been able to increase performance.

We expect this could lead to a small boom in business for search marketing pros who can effectively navigate Panama’s changes, and demonstrate that expertise to the small budget Yahoo search advertiser.