Microsoft announced the North America finalists for its 2026 Advertising Partner Awards on September 2, recognizing work completed between July 2025 and July 2026. Found is on the list twice: once for Data Innovation Excellence, and once for Search Performance Partner of the Year alongside a higher education client.
We're proud of both. And since awards lists are easy to skim past, it's worth saying what the work behind each one actually involved, because in neither case was it campaign management.
Why the data nomination
Almost all of it happened before anything reached an ad platform.
Connecting live business data to campaign execution means working at the API level, not in the campaign interface. Pulling from the CRM. Reconciling sources that disagree with each other, often across multiple CRMs inside one organization. Deciding which lead stages genuinely deserve to be treated as conversions and which are noise wearing a conversion's clothing. Then sending real outcomes back on a schedule fast enough that bidding can act on them: closed-won, revenue, ticket value.
Then there's the recovery work. Somewhere between 15% and 35% of conversion signal disappears before it reaches the platforms, stripped out by browser limitations and privacy changes. Server-side implementation gets it back, built so nothing leaves a client environment that shouldn't.
None of that is glamorous. All of it changes what the bidding algorithm believes about a business. A system optimizing toward "form submitted" and a system optimizing toward "closed-won, worth this much" go looking for entirely different people. Campaign structure can stay identical and the outcome still moves.
That is Data Activation work. It happens to be pointed at media.
Why the search nomination
The higher education work runs on the same principle, applied to one of the harder funnels in lead generation.
An inquiry in March is not a student in August. Cost per inquiry is easy to count and tells you almost nothing about whether a class fills. Optimizing toward the metric that arrives first will reliably load the top of the funnel and miss the outcome that matters.
So the job was closing that distance. Sending applications, deposits, and enrollments back as conversion signal. Pacing spend against application deadlines and yield windows rather than the calendar month. Allocating at the program level, because a program with 12 seats and a program with 300 cannot share a target cost per enrollment, however convenient a blended campus average would be.
The result is a search program optimizing toward students rather than toward whoever fills out a form fastest. That's the part worth recognizing, and it is mostly invisible from inside the ad account.
The through-line
Both nominations describe the same shift from different angles.
Microsoft handles more of the execution every year. Bidding, placement, increasingly targeting. All of it now runs inside systems that don't need a person pulling each lever. What's left, and what separates one advertiser from another, is the quality and completeness of what you hand those systems to work with.
We don't earn nominations like these with clever campaign structure. The work is mapping lead stages to what they mean commercially, reconciling two systems that disagree, and deciding what deserves to count as a conversion at all. None of it photographs well. It is, increasingly, the difference between an account that improves and an account that just gets managed.
Thank you
To our Microsoft Advertising team, who have made a genuine partnership out of what could easily have been a vendor relationship: thank you. Elite Partner status is a line on a website. The standing calls, the early looks at what's coming, and the people who pick up the phone are the part that actually reaches our clients' accounts.
To the client teams we work alongside on both of these: none of this work is possible without partners willing to open up their data and ask hard questions about what it says. That's rarer than it should be.
And congratulations to the rest of the finalists. It's a strong list.
Winners are announced October 29 in New York. The work continues on Monday either way.
Found Search Marketing is an enterprise paid media agency in Fishers, Indiana, and a Microsoft Advertising Elite Partner.