March 10, 2010 by Jenny Sanderson
You have to admire the sheer tenacity of Microsoft. It is well noted that Google completely dominate the search engine market with a massive 86% of the global market, whilst Microsoft’s Bing has a meagre 3.4% share. Despite this, Microsoft have embarked on an aggressive advertising campaign in the UK in the hope of at least stealing second place from Yahoo.
In a statement of intent Microsoft have moved to sponsor The Simpsons on Channel 4 in the UK. This comes as a part of their multi million pound campaign to promote Bing across the nation. The Simpsons is one of the most popular prime time television shows in the UK receiving a great deal of the target age viewers that Microsoft have identified as being most important to their success.
The sponsorship will run for 3 months as of this week and can be seen before, during and after the 6pm show on Channel 4. The advert has been especially created for the show as it presents a family happily using the Bing search engine.
This comes soon after the first television advert broadcast by Bing this week during the Manchester United VS AC Milan Champions League match on Wednesday. The ad campaign labelled ‘Bing and Decide’ conveys that whilst other search engines may give you an information overload, Bing functions more as a decision engine offering more of a categorized search.
Time will tell as to whether the millions spent by Microsoft on this campaign are worth while, they have set their sights on second place for now but ‘runner-up’ has never been a tagline the company has associated itself with so I am sure that Bing will have Google in its sights soon enough.
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