As part of the company’s $100 marketing push, Microsoft has started showing Bing search engine commercials on television in the US. The video is likely to appear in other countries as Bing’s localization effort progresses, but if you’re yet to see it…
At just over 1 minute, the commercial is very much style over substance. It’s flashy, fast, fashionable and warns that people aren’t searching – they’re bailing. Apparently, we’re all “lost in the links”. We don’t need queries and keywords that just lead to further questions – we need a decision engine.
Of course, the advert doesn’t actually tell us anything. Why does the company consider my previous searching experiences to be so flawed? What does Bing do? Why should use it? However, this air of mystery will tempt many people to trying Bing and that’s what Microsoft needs. Feedback about the search engine (sorry, decision engine) has been largely positive, but the project will only succeed if the company can persuade people to switch from Google and Yahoo.
Interestingly, there is just the briefest mention of Microsoft itself; their logo appears in the bottom-right corner during the last two seconds of the advert. Blink and you’ll miss it.
If you had not already used Bing would this commercial encourage you to do so? Has the company purposely downplaying the Microsoft brand? Does television advertising work for web sites?
Craig BucklerCraig is a freelance UK web consultant who built his first page for IE2.0 in 1995. Since that time he's been advocating standards, accessibility, and best-practice HTML5 techniques. He's created enterprise specifications, websites and online applications for companies and organisations including the UK Parliament, the European Parliament, the Department of Energy & Climate Change, Microsoft, and more. He's written more than 1,000 articles for SitePoint and you can find him @craigbuckler.
