London — Microsoft is about to unleash its first multimillion-pound UK TV ad campaign to promote its search engine Bing, as part of a major marketing push designed in a bid to steal Google’s dominance of the UK search market share.
The series of TV ads campaign to promote Bing, which will commence this week, and will run as part of a three month long promotion, which is costing Microsoft some $2 billion according to the Guardian.
The promotional advertising campaign will be backed up by the tagline: “Bing and Decide”, and the theme is that other big search engines — that would be Google then — throw an avalanche of confusing results at you.
“This is a big moment — we are taking out our slingshots and taking on Goliath,” said the managing director and vice-president of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, Ashley Highfield, adding that he believed Bing met a real desire from both consumers and advertisers.
Five months since the software giant took the search engine out of beta, the company is putting its weight behind a three month long advertising campaign.
The TV adverts will become live on March 10 across ITV, Channel 4, Five and a range of other digital channels across Sky and Virgin.
The slogan, “Bing and Decide”, is intended to show consumers how Bing is different to other search engines — and functions more as a “decision engine”. The ad displays people going through “information overload” and then the ways in which Bing could help solve that problem. Microsoft is attempting to position Bing as a search engine which can offer more organized search results through features such as “categorized search” and an enhanced search experience because of its “richer” aesthetic look across its home and search results pages.
“I think that we do need to have a marketing campaign and I think that the promotion we can give to it from some of our assets like MSN is very important,” Highfield said in a statement.
Highfield, added: “The ad campaign brings alive the concept of Bing as a decision engine, a tool that both cuts through the information overload and offers a new search experience. We are confident that this will help grow our user base.”
Of course, in reality swaying people away from a search engine that, for many, has become synonymous with the internet is going to be a tough ask.
Whereas Bing will deliver more concise and targeted results, claims Microsoft. “Bing is new, fresh and not another ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ project, concluded Highfield.
The company also emphasizes Bing is more visually appealing, in contrast to Google’s stark, plain white background.
Nevertheless, it will be an uphill task for Bing, particularly in the UK where Google has a veritable stranglehold on the search market.
“This is trench warfare and it would not be over in days and months but years.”