Microsoft Invest Shutdown: DSP Migration and Exit Playbook

Microsoft Invest, the DSP that began as AppNexus, stopped supporting media buying on 28 February 2026 (Microsoft Advertising, 14 May 2025). Advertisers had nine months to move audiences, deals, creatives, logs and reports. This playbook turns it into a repeatable exit plan for any rented DSP: what to export, how to mirror campaigns, which clauses to demand.

The page is written for two readers: the team that moved off Invest and wants to fix what the move exposed, and the team on any other rented DSP that wants an exit plan before it needs one.

Two features of the timeline matter for planning. The first is the ownership churn: a buyer who signed with AppNexus before the 2018 sale dealt with three owners and two renamings before the product closed, and the destination it was pointed to was itself renamed within seven months. The second is that Microsoft described the exit as a strategy change, not a failure: "the future of digital engagement is conversational, personalized, and agentic" and the DSP "no longer aligns with our investment in this future" (AdExchanger, 14 May 2025). A rented platform can be closed by a healthy owner for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Microsoft said it was "committed to supporting our clients during this transition" and would "continue to support access to Microsoft and partner inventory through third-party DSPs" (Microsoft Advertising, 14 May 2025). Inventory access was never the problem. The assets below were.

Audiences. Segments built on Xandr pixels and the segment feed lived in Xandr's server-side cookie store (Microsoft Learn, About Microsoft Invest, accessed 17 October 2026). Segment membership is keyed to the platform's own user IDs, so a list cannot be lifted into another DSP; it has to be rebuilt from the source signal. Lotame's offer illustrates the realistic path: "Share a list of your current or past Microsoft Invest audiences with us", receive matching third-party segments, and have custom audiences created "within 24–48 hours" (Lotame, 9 July 2025). The first-party pixel history, the thing that made the audiences yours, does not move.

Log-level data. Invest offered a Standard Feed, Bid Landscape Feed, Segment Feed, Conversion Pixel Feed, Video Event Feed and others, "via batch files", not through the API, and only for clients who had negotiated them (Microsoft Learn, updated 22 October 2025). Clients who had been taking the feeds kept what they had already ingested. Clients who had not were left with aggregated reports and a 14-month analytics window, with billing data "kept indefinitely" only inside the platform (Microsoft Learn, Key Value Analytics Report, accessed 17 October 2026). The retention policy had already been tightened on 3 March 2025 "as part of a data migration effort" (Microsoft Learn, 3 March 2025).

Deal IDs. Deals are negotiated with a seller and expressed as an identifier the DSP presents in the bid request. The identifier is platform-scoped. Every private marketplace deal had to be re-cut with each seller in the new DSP, which is why the Monetize to Amazon arrangement was framed around "deal curation" and "deal packages" (Microsoft’s primary announcement, October 7, 2025; PPC Land, October 7, 2025). The benchmark context: 81.6% of participating marketers' spend ran through private marketplaces in Q3 2025 (ANA Benchmark, Q3 2025), so for most buyers the deal book is the campaign.

Creatives. Creative assets can be re-uploaded, but audit status, creative IDs used in reporting, macro configurations and third-party tag wrappers cannot. Each new platform re-audits, and until it does, delivery is throttled or blocked.

Reporting history. Year-on-year comparisons, pacing baselines and attribution windows all live in the old platform's reporting. The standing retention rules show how little of that is durable: hourly data for 100 days, some reports 500 days, the vendor usage report 60 days (Microsoft Learn, Vendor Usage Report, accessed 17 October 2026). After closure, even the indefinite billing data is inaccessible unless it was exported.

Conversion history and optimization state. Conversion pixels, attribution lookback and the state of the platform's bidding models are non-portable by construction. The new DSP starts cold.

Integrations. Internal tools built on the Invest API for bulk operations and reporting had to be rewritten against a different API. Amazon's stated onboarding gave "agencies and technology partners" API access, with "enterprise advertisers" assigned account representatives and mid-market buyers routed to "ad tech activation partner programs" (Microsoft’s primary announcement, October 7, 2025; PPC Land, October 7, 2025).

A transparent counterparty. PPC Land's coverage of the announcement argued that the closure removed one of the more transparent DSPs in terms of visible fees and money flows, and noted Microsoft had not said whether those features would carry into its future products (PPC Land, May 2025). For a buyer that had used the fee visibility to audit supply paths, that was a measurement loss as much as a platform loss.

Microsoft's preferred path was Amazon. Amazon's Alan Moss framed it as "We recognize that moving to a new media buying system is a change for the migrating advertisers" (Microsoft’s primary announcement, October 7, 2025; PPC Land, October 7, 2025). The trade press expected independents to gain: Digiday's sources believed many buyers "would default to scaled independents such as The Trade Desk" (Digiday, 20 May 2025), and Adform's Jochen Schlosser put it as "you're adding Trade Desk or you're adding Adform" (PPC Land, 22 June 2025).

The cost of the move is not published, but the pricing of the destinations is partly known. The Trade Desk's 2025 filing implies a 21.6% take rate on gross spend (The Trade Desk 10-K, FY2025). Amazon's managed service was reported at a $50,000 minimum with a 15% service fee and a 10% platform fee, and in May 2026 an agency executive told Digiday that minimums for direct DSP access had reached the "tens of millions" (PPC Land, 15 October 2026). The full comparison, including white-label and flat-fee models, is in DSP Pricing Explained 2026.

The strategic cost is concentration. Each closure removes a counterparty from the set a buyer can play against each other. Microsoft itself had shut PromoteIQ the year before (AdExchanger, 14 May 2025), and the Invest buyers were pointed at a platform whose owner also sells the media.

Run this on the day a notice arrives, or better, once a year on every rented platform. Columns are the asset, what to export, the format to insist on, where it should land, and when. The deadlines assume a nine-month notice like Microsoft's; compress them if the notice is shorter.

Two points on the first row. The ANA's recommendation since its 2023 study has been that marketers "Get access to your log-level data. Ingest, match, and harmonize log-level data either in-house or use a third-party company" (ANA, December 2023). That advice was framed as a fee-transparency measure. The Invest closure showed it is also the only way to keep campaign history when a platform closes. And the feed has to be running before the notice arrives: Xandr's documentation notes that "Clients who receive log level data will typically have their own engineering resources or a third-party vendor build an ETL process" (Microsoft Learn, updated 22 October 2025), which is not a one-month job.

A mirror campaign is a copy of a live campaign running in a second DSP, with the same creatives, the same deals and the closest achievable audiences, measured by your own ad server or verification vendor rather than by either DSP. It does three jobs at once: it proves the destination works before the source closes, it produces a like-for-like cost and quality comparison, and it keeps the new platform's optimization models warm so the cutover does not start cold.

1. Pick two destinations, not one. Build the mirror in both. The second is your leverage in the fee negotiation and your fallback if the first fails its parity test. Digiday's and Adform's reading of the Invest exit was that buyers were choosing between The Trade Desk and Adform in Europe (PPC Land, 22 June 2025); the independent DSPs' sales teams will fund the setup effort.
2. Freeze the source structure. Export the campaign structure (row 8 of the checklist) and stop making structural changes in the source for the duration of the test. You cannot measure parity against a moving target.
3. Replicate deals first. Re-cut every deal ID with the seller in each destination, same terms. Deals are the slowest item and the one you cannot do unilaterally. Ask each seller for the deal in both DSPs in one email.
4. Submit creatives for audit on day one. Audit queues are the second slowest item. Use the creative manifest from the checklist.
5. Rebuild audiences from source signals, not from the old DSP's segments. Re-fire pixels into the new platform, re-onboard hashed first-party IDs through your CDP or clean room, and re-license third-party segments by provider and segment ID. Accept that lookalike and algorithmic audiences are new audiences.
6. Split budget 80/20, then 50/50. Run the source at 80% and each mirror at 10% for two weeks, then move to 50/50 between source and the preferred destination for two more weeks. Keep frequency caps consistent across platforms by using the ad server, not the DSP, as the cap of record.
7. Measure in your own system. Compare on ad-server impressions, verification-vendor viewability and fraud rates, your attribution, and the fee waterfall from log-level data: DSP fee, data fee, SSP fee and net-to-publisher. The ANA's TrueCPM, the cost per thousand impressions that are non-IVT, measurable and viewable, is the single most useful parity number (ANA Benchmark, Q1 2025). Set the parity gate in advance: for example, TrueCPM within 10% and buy-side fee share no higher than the source.
8. Cut over, then keep the source read-only. Move 100% of budget on the gate being met, keep the source platform open for reporting and exports until the final day, and confirm the last log file has landed before the vendor's deadline. Write the lessons into the RFP for the next contract; the DSP RFP template has a section for them.

The method costs money: duplicate setup, split learning, two sets of audit queues. The alternative, a single cutover on the deadline, costs the same money with less information. The 12 ad tech cost optimization strategies cover how to run the comparison without doubling the agency fee.

The clauses below address each loss in the section above. They are written as negotiating positions, not legal text; counsel will adapt them. The anchor is the WFA's 2019 checklist, which asks "Where does my campaign data sit?", whether it can be transferred to a vendor of the brand's choosing, and "Does my contract allow for internal & external audits?" (WFA, 3 May 2019). The ANA's 2023 study found that 52% of brands own direct contracts with their DSP (ANA, December 2023); the other 48% buy through an agency contract and need the same terms flowed down.

1. Data ownership. All campaign data generated on the advertiser's account (logs, reports, audiences, conversions, creatives, deal configurations) is the advertiser's data. The vendor processes it under instruction and acquires no rights beyond operating the service.
2. Log-level data as a right. Impression-level logs for all events are delivered from day one, at no additional charge or at a fixed price stated in the fee schedule, in a documented open format, with a published schema and change notice. Xandr's model, where the feed exists but "talk to your Xandr representative about ... pricing" (Microsoft Learn, updated 22 October 2025), is what this clause replaces.
3. Export formats. On request, and in any case on termination, the vendor delivers a full export of every data category in the checklist in machine-readable, non-proprietary formats (CSV, JSON, Avro, Parquet), with a data dictionary.
4. Notice period and wind-down. Discontinuation of the service, or of any material feature including log feeds or API endpoints, requires written notice of not less than twelve months. Microsoft gave nine and a half (Microsoft Advertising, 14 May 2025); twelve is the number to ask for, because deals and audits take a quarter each.
5. Post-termination access. Read-only access to the UI, API and reporting for a stated period (90 days is a reasonable ask) after the last campaign ends, with export rights intact throughout, followed by a certificate of deletion.
6. Change of control. A change of control of the vendor, or the sale of the product line, gives the advertiser the right to terminate without penalty and triggers the export and post-termination access clauses. Xandr changed owner in 2018 and 2022 before it closed (Light Reading, 21 December 2021).
7. Fee transparency and audit. Every fee is itemised against gross spend; no margin is taken inside the media price; the advertiser or its auditor may reconcile the vendor's logs against SSP and publisher logs. The agency rebate reference covers the equivalent audit rights on the agency side.
8. Deal portability. Deal identifiers are recorded with seller, terms and the SSP-side reference, and the vendor cooperates in re-establishing deals elsewhere on termination.
9. Escrow, where the software is licensed rather than rented. For a white-label or bidder-as-a-service contract, source code or deployable images are held in escrow with release triggers on insolvency, discontinuation or failure to support. Escrow is meaningless for a shared SaaS DSP, which is the point: a rented platform cannot be escrowed, only exported.
10. Assistance. The vendor provides named migration support and API access for the full notice period, as Amazon did for the Invest cohort by advertiser tier (Microsoft’s primary announcement, October 7, 2025; PPC Land, October 7, 2025), but written into the contract rather than offered after the fact.

The closure forces a choice that most buyers made under time pressure. Made calmly, it is a trade between fee model, control and operating burden. The table compares the three structures on the criteria the Invest episode exposed. Pricing inputs are from DSP Pricing Explained 2026; the architectural differences are in Bidder-as-a-Service vs White-Label DSP vs Self-Hosted DSP.

The honest reading is that most advertisers will stay on a rented DSP, because the break-even against a flat fee sits around the point where the flat license equals the percentage fee (worked through with assumptions in DSP Pricing Explained 2026). What the Invest closure changes is the contract, not the choice: every rented DSP should now be on the clauses above, with the checklist exports running continuously, so the next notice is an inconvenience rather than a loss. The ANA's own benchmark gives the direction of travel: higher-performing advertisers, who control their logs and supply paths, converted 52.3% of spend into quality impressions in Q2 2026 against 31.1% for the rest (ANA via Fiducia, 6 August 2026); the Working Media Benchmark tracks that gap each quarter.

Three actions, in order. First, run the portability checklist against every rented platform in the stack this quarter, including the SSP-side tools, the ad server and the verification vendor, since any of them can be closed or sold. Second, put the clauses into the next renewal and into the agency contract that flows them down; 66% of brands say they hold contracts with technology providers such as DSPs or verification partners (Basis, 29 July 2026), and the rest should ask their agency for the terms. Third, start the log-level data feed now, even if the only immediate use is the fee audit; the ANA's benchmark shows that only about half of participating marketers have won that access from their suppliers (ANA Benchmark, Q3 2025). The broader case for owning the data layer is in The real cost of cloud DSPs and data ownership and why brands are bringing programmatic in-house; the in-house programmatic hub collects the series. Teams weighing the self-hosted column should read How to Build a DSP in 2026 before deciding.

When did Microsoft Invest shut down? On 28 February 2026. Microsoft announced on 14 May 2025 that it would "no longer support media buying through our DSP, Microsoft Invest, starting on February 28, 2026" (Microsoft Advertising, 14 May 2025), and trade press confirmed in May 2026 that the platform "was shut down on February 28, 2026" (PPC Land, 7 May 2026). Early reports said "by March 2026"; the February date was the operative one.

What replaced Microsoft Invest? Nothing from Microsoft on the buy side of the open web. Microsoft moved its buy-side investment to the Microsoft Advertising Platform and kept Microsoft Monetize and Microsoft Curate for publishers (Microsoft Advertising, 14 May 2025). For Invest customers it named Amazon DSP as preferred transition partner on 7 October 2025 (Microsoft’s primary announcement, October 7, 2025; PPC Land, October 7, 2025). Amazon’s current product page describes Amazon Ads Agent as the unified platform and DVA+ as its display, video and audio buying experience (Amazon Ads, checked October 18, 2026). The dated trade coverage, October 15, 2026 is retained for the announcement context.

Can I export my data from a DSP before it closes? Aggregated reports and campaign structures, yes, through the UI or API. Impression-level logs only if you had a log-level data feed running; Xandr's feeds were batch files negotiated separately and "not available via the API" (Microsoft Learn, updated 22 October 2025). Audience membership keyed to the platform's own IDs cannot be exported in a usable form; audiences are rebuilt from your source signals. Microsoft published no sunset-specific retention or export terms that we could find (Microsoft Learn, accessed 17 October 2026).

How long does a DSP migration take? Plan for a quarter to three quarters. The slow items are re-cutting every deal ID with each seller and getting creatives through the new platform's audit; both depend on third parties. Microsoft gave nine and a half months' notice (Microsoft Advertising, 14 May 2025) and the Amazon transition path was announced with under five months left (Microsoft’s primary announcement, October 7, 2025; PPC Land, October 7, 2025). The mirror-campaign method above fits inside that window if deals and audits start in month one.

What should a DSP contract say about data portability? That the data is yours, that log-level data is delivered from day one in open formats at a stated price, that discontinuation needs twelve months' notice, that you keep read-only access and export rights after termination, and that a change of control lets you leave. The WFA's checklist asked the core questions in 2019: "Where does my campaign data sit?" and whether it can move to any vendor you choose (WFA, 3 May 2019). The ten clauses above turn those questions into terms.

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