• Ad Age, Wednesday, June 3, 2009 11:45 AM

Ad Age takes a first-look at Microsoft's ad campaign for its new search engine, Bing, which depicts the Google search experience as causing "search overload" compared to Bing, which is a more simplistic and relevant "decision engine." The voice-over for the new 60-second spot begins as follows: "While everyone was searching, there was bailing; while everyone was lost in the links, there was collapsing...We don't need queries and keywords if they bring back questions and confusion. From this moment on, search overload is officially over."

Gayle Troberman, general manager for advertising and customer engagement at Microsoft, tells Ad Age that the idea behind the ad was to trigger an emotional response to a decidedly unemotional concept (search). "Search has been about number of results and access to everything, and when you talk to people, they don't want everything anymore," Troberman says. "Less is the new more. ... [People] want the right things for them."

The major marketing challenge, of course, is convincing people that the Google search experience is bad. As report author Abbey Klaassen points out, most consumers are satisfied with search today, but Microsoft research indicates otherwise, as people spend lots of time tweaking their queries and, in some cases, are forced to abandon them altogether when they don't find what they're seeking.

"We've been lulled into thinking it's OK to spend two hours doing something that should have taken a few minutes," says Ty Montague, co-president and chief creative officer of JWT North America, which is creating the ads as part of Microsoft's $80-$100 million marketing push.

Read the whole story at Ad Age »