Simply announcing Bing's arrival, even with its great new features, would fall on deaf ears. But if we found a chink in Google's seemingly impenetrable armor, we could sow a seed of latent dissatisfaction in people's minds, making them more open to the idea of an alternative search engine.
That chink, we believed, was in the paradox of choice While page after page of blue links had become a great way to find things on the web when Google revolutionized it in 1997, now that we're drowning in content and getting lost in the links, such a vast choice seems downright overwhelming.
Some probing research confirmed our hypothesis about the struggle to navigate the overabundance of online information. Among people who claim to be VERY satisfied with their primary search engine, 69% believe that "search engines return ridiculously large amounts of results" and 63% think that it "takes too long to soft through the links to find the results you really need."
Our messaging strategy took shape around creating dissatisfaction with conventional search: the nation's first Search Overload Syndrome was diagnosed. Our Syndrome campaign brought to life, in a humorous way, the effects of this syndrome with people responding irrelevantly and uncontrollable to "keywords" they hear around them.
Simply presenting Bing as an incrementally better alternative to Google was not going to move the needle. We therefore positioned Bing, not simply as a better search engine, but a different animal all together – a "Decision Engine."
Syndrome: Hawaii
Synrome: Pregnancy
Syndrome: Santa
The results were spectacular. Not only did the campaign exceed Microsoft's goals in the 2nd month post launch, but 49% of people also believed that Bing represented a new generation of search.
“At the moment, Google's most pressing problem is Microsoft. …..Bing's slick ads are unavoidable and blistering. They suggest that Google is broken, that it rarely leads us to what we're looking for and turns us all into blathering zombies who spew out search keywords in casual conversation. ……. Microsoft — a company not previously known for its marketing savvy — is taking a page out of a 1960s Procter & Gamble playbook: create a problem consumers don't know they have, then solve it. Bing!” Time Magazine, The Search for a Rival, by Farhad Manjoo, Aug 31, 2009
In addition to TV advertising, Bing developed innovative and disruptive and branded content platforms with The Daily Show, Rachel Zoe, Anthony Bourdain, Sundance and the first ever advertising takeover of Hulu.
Bing on the Daily Show
Bing pays to fast forward commercials on The Daily Show.
Tonight, the company is giving fans of The Daily Show....... a bit of a treat. Microsoft has purchased a full two and a half minute block of commercials, sponsored by Bing, and will use the time to “fast forward” the ads with a TiVo-like experience. While this should be an interesting ad to see visually, it also means two more minutes of content from Jon Stewart. (Mashable, June 2009)
