Microsoft’s expected unveiling of a new search engine next week will be accompanied by a massive ad campaign that won’t mention Google and Yahoo by name but will ask if you’re happy with the results you get from competing services, AdAge reports.
The search engine will be named “Bing,” AdAge also says, which raises an obvious question: will an ad campaign said to be upwards of $100 million ever get anybody to say “Just ‘Bing’ it?”
Google has about 65% of the search market share, and Yahoo about 20%. Microsoft in the single digits. But so strategic is search, and so tied is it to ad-supported services that will only grow in importance with the increased use of cloud-computing — where your data is readily available to the people whose services you are using — and so deep are Microsoft’s pockets that even $100 million to move the needle a bit would seem to be worth the effort. Indeed, the Redmond, Washington software giant was willing to spend more than $30 billion to acquire Yahoo mainly to acquire its relatively better search prowess.
The ad campaign will embrace online, TV, print and radio. But the competition will go unmentioned, AdAge says.
People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won’t go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they’ll focus on planting the idea that today’s search engines don’t work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing’s biggest challenges.
Microsoft’s expected announcement, at this week’s prestigious All Things Digital conference, would follow by two weeks the hotly-anticipated launch of the Wolfram Alpha answer engine, which also touts itself as a niche-filler which provides factual answers to questions rather than providing links to source material which may contain the answer.
Besides trying to buy Yahoo and then trying to do just a search deal with them Microsoft has tried mightily to increase Live Search share organically, with little success. Efforts even included paying users directly with a cash back search service, which gave rebates on purchases made through Live.com.
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