• by Shankar Gupta , January 31, 2005

MSN today breaks a massive ad campaign for its proprietary search engine, MSN Search, which today will leave beta for a formal launch, MSN executives said Monday.

The campaign is designed to break Google's stranglehold on name-recognition in search. "It's true right now that Google does represent search, and a lot of people don't really think of MSN when they think of search, and our campaign is all about changing that," said Corporate Vice President for Global MSN Marketing Jane Boulware.

The ad campaign aims to reach 90 percent of U.S. households 40 times in the next eight weeks, said Chris Cocks, MSN's director of global campaigns. "This will be our biggest campaign since the introduction of the MSN Butterfly in 2000," Cocks said. The initiative will hit 25 markets in 10 languages concurrently.

In the United States, the campaign, coordinated by McCann Erickson, San Francisco, will include TV, viral, and out-of-home advertising, in addition to heavy online media. Online advertising will appear on MSN's home page and other MSN properties targeting the company's 360 million users. Apart from the MSN network, online ads will appear on sites including CNet, USAToday.com, and CBS Sportsline.

MSN will primarily buy ads on cable TV, but also plans to purchase air time in the top 12 metro markets during heavyweight television events like the Superbowl this Sunday, the Academy Awards, and the NCAA finals in March.

Interactive agency Avenue A will handle online media buying, while media planning will be shared by McCann Erickson and Avenue A. T3 Austin will also be handling some online creative and merchandising.

The campaign will also include a viral component, Cocks said, although he declined to comment on the specifics. "We're also going to have some innovative viral initiatives that we'd rather keep a bit secret," he said. "We'll be trickling them out in the next few weeks."

The viral ads are being produced by 42 Entertainment, a company that specializes in interactive game ads. "Our aim is to carve the client's world into today's cultural landscape, so that, like Middle Earth or Hogwarts, it becomes a priority destination for the American imagination," 42 Entertainment's Web site states.

The central idea of MSN Search, said Boulware, is to move beyond merely providing links by directly answering consumers' questions. "The focus for MSN search is to quickly get people to the answer they're looking for, not just links," she said. For example, if a customer types: "What is the capital of Chad?" into the search window, the top entry--above all the links--comes back with the answer: N'Djamena.

Most of these answers come from Microsoft's encyclopedia, Encarta. "You can do a math query, do a history query, and get a direct answer back," said MSN's Director of Product Management for Search, Bob Visse. "It changes the game in search, delivering answers right to your fingertips." In the future, Visse said, MSN will be integrating its other portal services into the answer portion of the searches. Yahoo!'s Overture will continue to power MSN's sponsored results. MSN also plans to incorporate its search engine into a toolbar, which is in beta testing now, and will be released within the next few months, Visse said.

Jupiter Research Analyst Niki Scevak said that MSN Search's key advantage over search giant Google is its ability to leverage its other properties in both marketing and functionality.

"The goal really here is to make MSN [Search] comparable to Yahoo! and Google so that they can then compete on other things like convenience and integration," Scevak said. "There's huge potential in the marketing power either through MSN's other portal properties or through Hotmail and Internet Explorer."