Ballmer at Cannes: 'Advertising. Advertising. Advertising'

You've heard Steve Ballmer's famous chant about "Developers. Developers. Developers." At the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival today, the Microsoft boss employed that speaking technique again when he started his talked about the advertising industry.

"Our guys talked to me and said: 'You are flying over to Cannes it is a big advertising deal. And immediately my brain locked on advertising, advertising, advertising. You go to talk about advertising," said Ballmer. "And I'd say for the first four weeks of working on this presentation, it was grounded in advertising. But I woke up one morning, and said no, we may start actually in a slightly different place. We may actually have to go all of the way back ... and think about the future of content and advertising because in some senses all ad possibilities are enabled by worlds of content."

You can watch the entire speech on the Cannes Lions Web site, which also included remarks about Apple (which he applauded for its app store), Google, the TV industry, the future of search, the economy and other topics.

Here's what Ballmer had to say about Google and online publishers.

"If you take a look at the Internet today, certainly Google makes a lot of money on their search site. But once you get past the Google search site, and you say: 'Is there a publisher, a content producer that's making a lot of money with an advertising or a fee-based model?' The answer is no. So, as all of us sit here as advertisers, we have to ask:  Who will be creating the content that people spend time on and what is their motivation and will they even have advertising on their Web sites?"

And here's his thoughts on the poor marketing of its search efforts in the past:

"I can say it now, Bing. I used to have to say Microsoft search service or MSN Live or Live Search. It was not our strongest marketing day. Now, it is simple: www.bing.com. It is the cleanest piece of marketing that I'd say we've done in a long time. But as a publisher that is a very important effort for us. We've got an incredibly strong competitor, as strong as probably anybody has had in any market. It is weird dynamics when everything is ad funded ... and yet we are out there innovating"

Ballmer also predicted the death of traditional media, as reported by The Guardian.

"All content consumed will be digital, we can [only] debate if that may be in one, two, five or 10 years. There won't be [only traditional] newspapers, magazines and TV programmes. There won't be [only] personal, social communications offline and separate. In 10 years it will all be online. Static content won't cut it in the future."

The more informal Q&A portion of the talk starts around minute 25.

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