MSN rebranded their live paid search offering as Bing last year in what appeared to be a fairly ill conceived plan to steal market share away from Google. Despite having very deep pockets, which they have used to promote heavily on TV, billboards etc it seems obvious that the product itself has nothing new to offer and begs the question; why switch from Google?
The TV Ads themselves although original in terms of their execution say nothing about the brand. It must have been a very difficult brief for the creative agency involved as they had little to work with in terms of the actual proposition.
Despite this, recent com score data reveals MSN have actually managed to capture more of the market with Google having to surrender a small amount of ground. MSN’s market share has increased by roughly 2% over the last few months. Whilst this is a noticeable win for them, it’s unlikely to be concerning the big wigs at Google at this stage. It could be argued that this was to be expected given the size of the advertising budget committed and is likely to be short lived unless the product itself takes serious strides forward in the next few months.
Our exposure to Bing will no doubt increase further in the coming months as MSN’s deep pockets force it in as the default search engine with some of major online players. MSN also appear to be stepping up the frequency of their advertising judging by activity in the last few months, this is clearly a committed push the likes of which we have not seen before from either MSN or Yahoo. But do they have a long term strategy to really compete, or is this little more than a advertising blitz?
Tags: PPC
