First Bing Ad Bombs, Others Are The Bomb

• Marketing
• Microsoft
• WWW
• June 3, 2009

Microsoft’s first Bing TV spot is scary. It’s designed to scare the crap out of you. Every bad thing going on now is because of bad search. The doom and gloom reminds me of  the TV commercial from Christmas comedy “Scrooged” (see first clip below). There, actor Bill Murray used scare tactics to convince people to watch his fictitious network’s live broadcast of “Scrooge.” That said, the second and third commercials are simply stunning, exactly the kind of marketing Microsoft should be doing for Bing.

Best to dispense with the bad first: I watched the first Microsoft Bing TV spot five times today, and it was more painful each time. Commercials are supposed to be endearing. They’re supposed to make you feel good, to feel like Product X or Brand Y will make your life better. Instead, the commercial makes you feel bad about your lost savings, inflated mortgage and being unemployed. Lovely: “While everyone was searching, there was bailing. While everyone was lost in the links, there was collapsing.”

I get the point about making the right decisions. But must Microsoft beat you so that you feel good for not being whacked aside the head? Repeatedly. Long Zheng favors the second, happier, part of the ad over the first portion. I totally agree.

Perhaps the first Bing commercial reflects Microsoft executives’ dim view of the search world. After all, Google has crushed every Microsoft effort to gain search share. The commercial’s first part expresses their despondency and the second part their hope in Bing.

By the way, there’s a great Apple dig that almost makes the first Bing commercial worth watching: A monkey banging on a MacBook. The insinuation: Only a baboon would use a Mac. Ouch.

Somewhere, someday, someone may receive an award for this first Bing commercial. It’s got that kind of appeal. Too much advertising is focused on making statements, of ad agencies winning the approval of peers when the focus should be helping clients sell products and build brand awareness.

Microsoft is starting from scratch with Bing. The company is building up a new brand from nothing. First impressions matter. Microsoft should want people to feel good about Bing. There’s too much feel bad in this first ad. Didn’t Microsoft’s Online Services Group learn anything from the early mistakes in the $300 million Windows marketing campaign? Esoteric commercials win awards, not brand awareness.

Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunters” and “The Rookies” commercials work surprisingly well, in part because they feature people. D`oh, it’s not rocket science. People identify most with people. Why else are people most commonly featured on magazine covers? Bing advertising needs to get more real, be more about people whose lives are better because of the “decision engine.”

For all the reasons stated above for why the first commercial doesn’t work, the second one is sheer delight. Best of all: Microsoft kicks Google between the legs by attacking keywords. Last week, I asserted that Microsoft should go after keywords both in its technology and marketing approaches. Simply brilliant: In the second commercial, a woman asks her husband, “Hey, did you ever find tickets to Hawaii?” He responds by babbling off keywords.

Oh, this ad is so juicy my laptop keys are dripping. How do people want to search? Ask a question. To which a search engine brings keywords, in this ad, “Hawaii Five-O—book `em, Danno.” The second commercial is exceptionally good marketing, so much that I have to apologize for spending so much of this post harping on the first. But my motivation is good: Microsoft marketers have got to steer away from commercials like the first and more to ones like the second.

Again, the second TV spot is exceptionally good. But wait, there is a third commercial, which posted while I was writing. A daughter walks up to her father and asks, “Hey, dad, did you pick me out a cell phone?” To which he starts babbling: “Cell walls are thicker than plasma membranes.” So she asks again and gets another meaningless response and more when asking her mom what’s wrong with her father.

The third commercial is even better than the other two. People conduct searches only to get meaningless answers. So they refine the searches only to get even more meaningless answers. As metaphors, the daughter is the searcher and her dad the search engine. Her mom is the other search engine used when the first fails to give a meaningful answer.

Hot damn, this is great advertising and almost makes up for the scary first commercial. Microsoft is effectively using people to market Bing. Bwahahaha, maybe the second and third commercials are scary, too. Scarily good.

By the way, people don’t always need to be the center of good advertising. Sprint’s Now Network commercials are exceptionally appealing. Hell, I’m halfway to buying a Palm Pre because of the TV spots. Last night, I downloaded the Now Network desktop widget, but it choked on Windows Vista. Why? I like the advertising.

Do you have a search overload story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

advertising Bing commercials keywords Microsoft search