advertising budgets

The emissary from Google came bearing a PowerPoint presentation.

As the Ocean Spray team at ad agency Arnold Worldwide squeezed into a small conference room in its Boston headquarters, Jim Norton, Google's Boston agency team manager, plugged in his laptop. "We want to help you any way we can," he said.

That's a surprising pitch from Google, which fueled its spectacular growth with small ads placed by users, not professionals. But now the Internet search giant is wooing the agencies that direct the advertising budgets of the world's largest companies.

In today's struggling economy, every dollar counts, particularly in the volatile field of online advertising. Like most of the major search engines, Yahoo has seen its advertising revenues decline, putting additional pressure on a company already rocked by leadership changes and a falling market share.

In an effort to help companies get more value for their online advertising dollars, Yahoo announced Tuesday that it is offering three new targeting tools: Search Retargeting, Enhanced Retargeting, and Enhanced Targeting.

Microsoft's aggressive campaign to increase its position in digital advertising took another step this week as it announced the acquisition of Navic Networks, a television advertising provider. Terms were not disclosed.

The deal, announced Tuesday, will give the software giant ownership of Navic's sophisticated campaign-management tools for digital advertising. Those tools optimize where and when interactive television ads are placed. One tool, called Admira, offers a unified ad network so that selected audiences can be targeted across all ads in a campaign.