The Microsoft Accelerate Roadshow walked us through the announcements Microsoft Advertising made at its flagship Accelerate event back in March, with a UK lens on what’s actually going to be available to advertisers running campaigns over here in the next few months.
For anyone not following the wider story, Microsoft has been quietly rebuilding its ad stack around Copilot. The Roadshow makes clear that this isn’t a side project. Copilot is now the centre of how Microsoft expects users to discover, research and buy things, and the ad formats are being rebuilt to fit that pattern rather than the traditional search-results pattern.
The bits below are what I’d take into a Monday morning planning meeting. The rest of the day was useful framing, but not much you need to act on this week.
What Microsoft Means by ‘Tailoring, Not Targeting’
There was one point Microsoft kept making across the day. The search box isn’t where most buying decisions are happening anymore. People are asking Copilot questions, getting suggestions, comparing things in a thread, and only sometimes ending up on what looks like a traditional results page. Microsoft’s own term for this is a move from targeting to tailoring, but the practical reality is they’re rebuilding ad formats for that conversational pattern: placements built for chat, generative creative, and ads that respond to what someone is actually saying mid-conversation. They keep using the word “agentic” for this, which I’m not sold on as terminology, but the underlying idea is real enough.
Microsoft’s own first-party signal so far is that ad relevance metrics inside Copilot are around 25% better than what they see in traditional search. That’s their figure, taken from internal data, so worth treating with the usual caution, but it’s the same direction of travel as Google’s own AI Overviews data.
Microsoft Copilot Showroom Ads Explained
The most concrete new format is Showroom Ads, which lives inside Copilot conversations rather than on a search results page. When a user is asking Copilot questions about a product and starts to show purchase intent, they may be invited into a richer ad experience where they can keep asking questions and the brand’s content adapts as the conversation develops.
The pilot has been running with select clients since April, which is worth flagging because it means by the time the format opens up properly, the early participants will have a meaningful data advantage. That’s a fairly typical pattern with Microsoft’s pilots, and there’s a reasonable case for getting on the waiting list rather than waiting for general availability.
Dynamic Filters and Dynamic Search Ad Generation
Two smaller updates worth a mention. Dynamic filters, live in English markets from this spring, let Copilot users narrow down options without typing extra questions, which is a useful nudge towards conversion once intent is established.
Dynamic ad generation is the other piece. Microsoft is now using query signals to build Dynamic Search Ads on the fly and reports a 20% lift in CTR from that approach. The plan is to extend the same technique to copy generation and image selection per user context, which is the more interesting part of the announcement because it’s what makes the format scale across campaign types, including Performance Max.
Microsoft Ads Studio and the Copilot Asset Creation API
Microsoft also showed Ads Studio, a creative tool built around generating and managing assets at the volume modern campaign types actually need. It’s launching first in the Microsoft Advertising Platform and rolling out across other Microsoft platforms over the coming quarters, including the Invest DSP.
Alongside that, Copilot asset creation is now available via the Campaign Management API, which is the announcement most agencies will care about. Generating creative variants one at a time inside the UI is fine for small accounts; for any agency running scaled creative testing it’s the API path that matters, and it’s now there.
Microsoft Ad Reach Across Edge, Windows and Gaming
A useful reminder during the day: Edge has now passed 30% market share in the US on Windows, with 15 consecutive quarters of share growth. The Windows Start menu reaches more than a billion people worldwide. Microsoft is opening up App campaigns into both the Start menu and the Microsoft Store, and into the gaming side, including Candy Crush and the wider King catalogue across Android, iOS and Windows.
The gaming reach is the more interesting half of that for most performance advertisers. King’s audience profile is genuinely different from search, and getting App campaigns into casual gaming on a managed-bidding basis closes a gap that other platforms have had open for years.
Microsoft Brand Agents and Conversational AI
The other significant announcement is brand agents: persistent, conversational representatives of a brand that sit on the brand’s own website and answer customer questions in the way a human agent would, at the scale of a software product. Microsoft has opened a pilot for this, with select clients invited to build agents on their own sites as a first step. The longer-term picture they sketched is one where these brand agents become callable from Copilot itself, so that a user asking Copilot about a sector might end up talking to a brand’s own agent rather than a generic response.
This is the area I’m most curious about and also the one where I’d want to see real client data before getting carried away. The promise is significant; the practical implementation will vary enormously by sector, and for any brand whose customer support is already AI-augmented, the question is whether a Microsoft-orchestrated agent layer adds something or duplicates effort.
What Microsoft Accelerate 2025 Means for Marketers
If I were summarising the Roadshow into a planning conversation with a client, it would come down to three things:
- Get on the pilot lists for Showroom Ads and brand agents if your sector fits. Early access is the only way to build any learnings before the formats open up properly.
- If you’re running scaled creative testing, the Copilot asset creation API is the route to actually use generative creative at agency scale, rather than asset-by-asset inside the UI.
- Don’t let the new placements distract from the boring win. Edge has been gaining share for fifteen quarters running and most accounts still under-index against the available reach inside Microsoft properties.
Microsoft has spent the last two years looking like it was watching Google make all the big AI moves first. That’s not quite the picture anymore. The Accelerate announcements aren’t “me too” catch-up; they’re a different read on where ads sit when more buying happens inside an AI conversation. Whether that read is right we won’t really know for another twelve to eighteen months. The catch with sitting these things out is that it tends to be the most expensive option in any platform shift, which is worth remembering when next year’s budgets are being argued over.