The first commercial already available

Mar 11, 2010 10:45 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is focusing prominently on only a few markets worldwide with its new search/decision engine, with the United States at the top of the company’s list of priorities, followed somewhat closely by the United Kingdom. In this context, it should come as no surprise that, after it pushed Bing on the US market, the Redmond company chose to focus on UK customers next. A new series of Bing video advertisements has been kicked off in the UK, attempting to draw customers away from Google.

“For those of you in the UK, Microsoft is launching the first of three Bing television ads that will be hitting the airways today, Wednesday, March 10th across ITV, Channel 4, Five and their portfolio of TV services as well as Sky Media and IDS digital channels including Bravo, Dave, GOLD, Living TV and Good Foo,” Eric Ligman, Global Partner Experience lead Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, revealed.

The first video ad is embedded at the bottom of this article and users already familiar with Bing marketing will find it quite familiar. Fact is that the Bing video ads for the UK are designed on the same concept that was the core of the US marketing push. Microsoft is promising that Bing acts as a filter for information overload.

In the first half of 2009, the software giant rebranded not only Live Search as Bing, but attempted to put a spin on “search engine” by labeling its newly launched search service as a decision engine. UK customers will come across the same mantra as US users, namely that Bing helps clear information overload. The first ad features people who start answering randomly, jumping from topic to topic and delivering nothing but nonsense rather than answers.

Microsoft is obviously taking a shot at Google with its information overload campaign, however, the company’s mission in the UK will be much harder than in the US. While on the other side of the pond Bing accounts for approximately 11.5% of the search-engine market, in the UK, the search share of Microsoft’s engine is of only about 3%, while Google’s dominance is absolute, owning over 90% of the market.