Bing.com Ad Has a Sharp Edge
June 10, 2009
Dan Neil’s “Microsoft’s Bing TV Ad: Huh” made me want to see the actual commercial. You can read his story in the June 9, 2009, Chicago Tribune here. I know that Microsoft plans to spend $80 to $100 million to make the verb “google” go the way of the Colinus virginianus ridgwayi. Mr. Neil wrote:
As an opening gambit, Microsoft’s campaign for its new Bing search engine accuses Google of causing global economic ruin. That’s cheeky.
I agree. He continued:
The bigger problem has to do with the Bing campaign’s notionally flawed phrase “decision engine.” Bing is promoting itself as a better class of search engine that returns results that are more restricted and more relevant, which is to say, more what the user had in mind. To which I say “maybe.” I just searched for “non sequitur” in Google and got back 1.8 million results, while the same search on Bing returned a scarcely more helpful 800,000. Nevertheless, “decision engine” goes astray because it suggests that Bing itself, the algorithmic software, the wizard behind the curtain, is making the decision and not the user. Also, the Bing campaign’s take-away argument, that online users are suffering from “search overload,” flirts with a kind of information totalitarianism. “Less is the new more,” Microsoft’s general manager for advertising, Gayle Troberman, told AdAge. That sounds alarmingly like “The choice is the burden.”
The write up accomplished one thing: This addled goose wants to see the commercial that caused BearStearns to implode over the weekend in April. Darn Google. I just sold BearStearns a project on Friday and the company was history on Monday. I knew I would find out the truth sooner or later. Thank heavens for Bing.
Stephen Arnold, June 10, 2009
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One Response to “Bing.com Ad Has a Sharp Edge”
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Bing might steal some market from google at this initial stage. But in the long term it will lose all, and even more if MS does not add something really innovative.