Windows Phone 7 an “advertising machine”, launches in October

Microsoft has been speaking at the Cannes Lions advertising conference about their advertising platform, including Windows Phone 7.

In the above video we have Kostas Mallios, GM Live Labs at Microsoft showing the features Windows Phone 7 has as an advertising platform.  The demo comes down to 3 features of the OS: Applications as ads, being able to pin these applications as live tiles to the start screen and get updates and continuing engagement with the user there, and “toast” which appears to be notifications application developers (which in AdApps will be the advertisers) will be able to send to the end user.

The demo also notes that advertisers will be able to deep link to the app store, meaning the user experience going from a website to installing the application can be very smooth.

While interesting the demo does of course not go as far as Apple’s iAds, but it does somewhat remove the confusion of using an application and then suddenly being taken and engaged into a whole different experience with an ad instead, and in many ways it can function very similarly, if developers use deep links to an AdApp from their application.

It does however provide a much high level of engagement with the end user available to the advertiser, versus AdApps on the iPhone, where the application can only remains a dead icon (now possibly hidden in a folder) that has zero other opportunities to engage with the user.

The video ends with an interesting but unrelated demo, with the claim that Windows Phone 7 will feature 0-click sharing, with photos taken with the camera being uploaded directly to the users Skydrive, much like the KIN does to KIN Studio.

Also unrelated but of note is that Mich Mathews,  Microsoft VP for Marketing again confirmed an October date for the launch of Windows Phone 7 (thanks clint for picking that up).

Should Microsoft go the final step and provide a toolset and market for app developers and advertisers to encourage ad-funded applications, much like Apple has? Let us know below.