Uh-Oh, That Bing Ad Zings After All
After totally dissing the first of Microsoft’s Bing commercials, yesterday, I today must retract my opinion. In the proper context, the ad for Bing zings.
I don’t often change opinions like this. But I saw the commercial on my 42-inch Vizio TV in HD last night. The TV ad aired right after the first break from The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. There’s no question the commercial has impact—and not nearly as negative as I expressed yesterday.
Rather, I liked the impact on the big screen, where, for me, the 60-second spot played much better than on YouTube. Eh, size matters.
But I’ll concede something. My positive reaction might be tainted. Conan O’Brien is absolutely hilarious. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was boring by comparison. The new Tonight Show is so much better, and Conan is the reason. Yeah, he was good doing Late Night, but he’s got better rhythm on the earlier show.
Back to Bing. I like the new search service the more I use it. The key word—not keyword—is discovery. Too much Google search is about commerce, assuming that you want to buy something. Bing assumes you want to find or find out abut something. Microsoft’s “Decision Engine” moniker is more than marketing.
But frequent commenter billybob proposed something interesting in comments to Tuesday’s Bing story:
My theory is that Bing is going to use affiliate marketing to monetise. The flight search and shopping results were the major tell for me. If you search for Barcelona to Amsterdam you do not get any of the ‘decision’ features, but New York to San Fransisco does which means they are hard coded because they rely on business agreements.
I definitely can see some of that related to Bing Cashback. Last night, I used Bing to search for the “Sigma DP2” digital camera. The results are surprisingly relevant and clean of ads. By comparison, Google search for “Sigma DP2” assaults the reader with shopping links.
Bing offers four basic search categories, three of which—health, shopping and travel—are naturals for affiliate marketing. What is Bing Cashback, if not an affiliate marketing program.
Billybob is right. Affiliate marketing is one way for Microsoft to go with Bing. It’s a way to pull back from the keyword-revenue-driven search that defines Google. But I don’t see Microsoft going crazy with paid Bing placements, or so I hope.
Do you have a marketing story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.
I have seen the first ad 3 times on the History Channel today and the point Microsoft is trying to make rings home for me each time. Searching now reveals a host of references that usually provides the answer I’m looking for on the first page, or within the categories to the left. This reduces frustration and allows me to move forward with the efforts I was working on quickly prior to engaging the Bing decision engine.
Life travels at the pace of internet time now. I just don’t have the time to waist on Google anymore.
Didn’t see the adds. Stumbled onto bing because of the MSN taskbar.
I love bing. After years of googling I actually have a new default search.
Amazing.
Bing is proving to be a joy to use. I’ve been getting not just what I want to know about, but what I want to do.
I build a lot of custom machines, and was this evening looking for not just case fans, but those of a very specific type. Bing made short and pleasant work of it, while Google returned a sea of confusion, comparatively.
It can be tough out here when suppliers struggle to keep up with our unique needs. It was nice to see a new resource make things easier and clearer. Bing does that and it’s just better than Google where matters most to me.
From what I\’ve read and seen in personal use, bing provides every bit as relevant results as google and does it with an incredibly eye pleasing home page. All M$ really needs to do at this point is to make the advertising campaign as fresh and offbeat as possible. Finally, I would love to see M$ branch out and start using the occasional animated scene. A Far Side from time to time would be outstanding.
There are 2 problems with affiliate marketing.
1. It reduces trust in the quality of the search results. If they only show me results for companies which participate in the cashback deal then how can I be sure that I am searching the entire market? By contrast the Google shopping results are not paid for. It is no coincidence that Amazon is the only retailer on your list which does not signup to the cashback deal but they do offer a large affiliate scheme. It would be interesting to see if the Amazon result has an affiliate code embedded.
2. It does not scale. Google’s big advantage is that their entire infrastructure is designed to scale. Bing is clearly not. Would you swap the pleasing images for a fast loading search result when and if Bing becomes popular? The popup previews and video streaming are other examples of wasting resources for the sake of Bling, errr Bing.
Oh, and the prices are wrong. The J&R Price on your results is $616 but after clicking through 2 screens and waiting a few seconds I see that the price is actually $649, just like on Google. Clicking back after looking at the product does not take you back to the search results. Instead you have to fight through the affiliate page to get what you want. The $616 price is probably after cashback – but to get that you have to agree to Microsoft’s privacy policy, and agree to receive spam for the rest of your life.
A few points:
1. I agree that trust will be an issue in this case, however I have not found that to be the case in some of the purchases I have made in the past through cashback. I think people are smart enough to know never to buy an item online right away, unless they know they are getting a deal or they don\’t find a lower price anywhere else. Having other search engines available makes the trust issue a nonissue. I think that while bing is quite appealing and good, competition is needed in the market. How do you know google is giving you the best deals available? You don\’t, you \’trust\’ that they\’ve done their homework and searched all the available shopping site.
2. As for scale, I think MS is in a pretty good position. They are probably the only ones who can match of surpass google in this space. They have a number of huge data centers that host all of their other services, so I doubt scale would be an issue. Remember IM alone has millions of active users everyday, and that is more taxing then giving results to queries. Also don\’t forget that Azure is coming soon and that is all datacenter stuff. I doubt MS would launch such a product without the back-end in order.
3. The prices you mentioned are not wrong. if you checked out the explanations on the cashback site, it clearly states that you will pay the original price on the seller\’s site and the \’cashback\’ will be added to your cashback account after succesfull completion of the transaction. Kind of like a rebate. You pay full price, but will get some of it back after a certain amount of time.
You are right that they need to make this process much more cleaner and transparent, so that you don\’t have to feel all anxious when you enter your credit card number in the box. However, I have had no issues so far personally and the cashback support staff was incredibly fast and helpfull in the early days when bugs and kinks were being ironed out.
Also don\’t think MS is in the business of sending you spam. I have never received anything from cashback that was not relevant to a purchase I made or notifying me of actions I needed to take to cash my \’cashback\’. Hardly spam
Just my 2 cents.