• Ad Age, Monday, June 1, 2009 11:31 AM

Bing may be live now, but it wasn't when Microsoft introduced the new search engine last week, potentially wasting a big opportunity to bring in new users, says Ad Age's Abbey Klaassen. According to the report, Bing was the subject of 1,500 news stories, spent almost a full 24 hours on Twitter's trending-topics list, and per Nielsen Online, it accounted for 0.23% of all blog conversations on the day that it was formally unveiled.

However, visits to Bing.com only produced a landing page that said, "Coming soon" along with a three-minute video trailer outlining some of the new search engine's highlights. Indeed, says Klaassen, "some people were puzzled when they got to Bing.com and couldn't actually try it out." So, how many people was this? The exact data was unavailable at press time, but the day before its launch, Bing.com was seen by 0.9% of all people online, according to Compete.

As PR specialist Michael Kempner, CEO of MWW, says, "It's one thing to announce hardware or a consumer-electronics product and build up anticipation and something else to announce an Internet product that's not available." Microsoft's launch strategy may be perplexing, but at least the software giant has the financial muscle to follow up with a $100 million advertising push, which will be spearheaded by the ad agency JWT.

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