Brian McAndrews managed aQuantive into a $6 billion acquisition by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Now one of the Redmond company’s more expensive acq-hires—it was the largest acquisition ever for Microsoft—only has to manage Microsoft to success in online advertising. Both the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) and Wall Street Journal shed a little light on McAndrews’ actions and plans as the head of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions (APS) Group formed last month in the company’s latest ad overhaul. McAndrews, who reports to Kevin Johnson, president of the platforms and services division, is responsible for building the ad platforms that serve the advertiser and publisher community—Atlas, DRIVEpm, MSNDR and Microsoft AdCenter, in-game and mobile ads, Avenue A | Razorfish, etc.

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NYT:  McAndrews’s strategy separates online advertising from search, something the NYT describes as a divorce because the two have been viewed as a couple. He says that shortchanges both advertisers and publishers. His proposal: “conversion attribution” which “would track all of the online places where consumers see ads and give advertisers a fuller picture of the various ways that consumers reach them. Tracking is important, because the site that gets credit for prompting a user’s visit is the one that gets paid for it.” He contends that search engines—insert Google (NSDQ: GOOG)—don’t deserve all the credit they get since consumers often look for companies after seeing ads. aQuantive’s Atlas division will provide advertisers with a log of the online places where people see ads before going to the advertiser’s sites. Much more detail in the article.

WSJ: Not about advertising as much as Microsoft’s new reliance on outsiders including McAndrews and Don Mattrick, the EA vet now heading its videogame group. McAndrews, who was an exec at ABC Sports before aQuantive, wouldn’t take the job until he was promised he could hire a “big team of engineers.“Johnson tells the Journal McAndrews’s experience in guiding the online-ad company through boom, bust, IPO and expansion is why he’s trying to be hands-off: “He’s used to being CEO. If you let him run his business and let him achieve the goals he wants to, we’ll be fine.”