Redmond, Washington — A novel breed of advertisements that portrays the bad guys in one of the most popular series of videos on YouTube shows the villainous pigs using Microsoft’s search engine in their quest to locate and steal the birds’ eggs. And Conan O’Brien plays the world’s biggest game… In a promotional advertisement to lure millions of Angry Birds’ pig-hating enthusiasts to Microsoft Bing, developer Rovio on Monday disclosed that it will integrate Bing Search in its back story for a limited time.
Bing has forged alliance with Rovio, makers of the popular game “Angry Birds,” to push its search engine through sponsoring four animated videos featuring Bing image search, maps, and shopping. The ad segment depicts the pigs, the villains of the game, who make use of Bing on a smartphone to search out bird eggs and have off with them. Two of those 15-second ad clips are up this morning, with the other two to be released later on down the line.
Angry Birds maker Rovio stated on its blog, “For a limited period, Angry Birds and Angry Birds Seasons will feature integrated, contextual Bing searches to help players find more than hundred solutions for tricky levels, and discover the elusive Golden Eggs and squash the porcine thieves.”
So that is how they find the eggs… (Credit: CNET)
In a post on the Bing Blog, the company says this same capability is coming to the original Angry Birds game as well, in a slightly expanded form:
The product placement involves Bing Image Search, Bing Maps, and Bing Shopping. The promotional videos show Angry Birds fans how they can advance in the game, featuring the lovable Angry Birds characters.
“Angry Birds” is the most popular paid iPhone app of all time. The app has been downloaded 30 million times via iPhone, Android, and iPad. This is the game’s first product consolidation. With 25 million gamers spending 200 million minutes playing each day, no doubt Bing is hoping to turn some of these dedicated “Angry Birds” players into dedicated Bing users.
The Redmond Vole is struggling to wrest away market share from the current search juggernaut, Google. Bing has been moving upward of late, ballooning its market share and unique visits, and also surpassing Yahoo globally. This partnership with Rovio should provide Bing with a spike in searches, but time will tell if this will make loyal Google users into loyal Bing users instead.
Of course, the skeptical might note that Microsoft is using Google’s YouTube along with an app available only on rival Android and iPhone devices to gain attention for its search service. But, Microsoft is certainly not alone in trying to fly along with the Birds and their soaring success. Google, for instance, highlighted Angry Birds in a developer video last year, while Fox has a tie-in for its upcoming movie “Rio,” which will include a new Angry Birds Rio game due out this month.
In any case, the new Bing ads are certainly entertaining and worth a gander for Angry Birds fans. You can watch two of the videos Bing has posted below, Bing wrote in a blog post. Additional videos will be posted on Bing’s YouTube channel.
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{iframe width=”620″ height=”390″ align=”top”}http://www.youtube.com/v/so3hz1KqmXY{/iframe}