CEO Carol Bartz explains what Yahoo is getting for its $100 million ad campaign, its first global marketing effort, which was launched today in New York during Advertising Week.
Here’s the rundown of Bartz’s press conference on the branding blowout.
Another month, another half-point: Microsoft’s search market share crept up again in August, according to the newest numbers from comScore. Since Steve Ballmer and company launched Bing at the end of May with a $100 million marketing push, they’ve moved from eight percent to 9.3 percent. So: If you’re Yahoo, and you’re about to kick off a Bing-sized marketing blitz of your own, do those numbers give you encouragement or pause?
CEO Tim Armstrong says he’s still overhauling the Internet company in advance of its spinoff from Time Warner, but he has hopeful noises to make about ad sales. He has nothing, however, to say about chats with Microsoft.
Microsoft slowly claws back a bit of share from Google, as well as Yahoo, its partner to be. But despite a huge ad blitz, there are probably more than a few people who have no idea that Bing is a “decision engine,” or what that means.
Give this to Steve Ballmer: After getting roundly hammered in the past few years for either missing out on deals (see: AOL/Google) or paying too much for the ones he did land (see: Facebook at $15 billion), he seems to be on a roll.
Last week, Microsoft was roundly praised for the way it structured its Yahoo deal. And today, the company seems to have struck a smart pact with Publicis, which will pay $530 million for Redmond’s Razorfish digital ad agency, which Ballmer never wanted anyway. Just as important: The French ad giant will agree to buy a certain amount of search and display inventory from Microsoft over the next five years.
Is the ad market really starting to rebound? Or is the (muted, cautious) happy talk we we’re hearing this spring just happy talk? Time to take a peek at Google’s quarterly earnings this afternoon, which might give us some insight.
As per Google’s last report card, Wall Street is expecting the company’s revenue to decline from the previous quarter–unthinkable for Google in prior years, but now no longer a shock. But Wall Street will be looking for both numerical and qualitative hints that things are getting better, or at least have bottomed out.
We’ve seen multiple studies showing a boost for Microsoft’s search share since it launched Bing a month ago, and now comScore weighs in and says the same thing. ComScore is the market mover when it comes to this stuff, so it will be interesting to see how Wall Street digests the news. My gut: Not a needle mover.
JP Morgan has good news for Microsoft: Its massive ad campaign for Bing is working just fine. The bad news for Microsoft: For most people, Google is already working just fine.
An endless ad barrage may be enough to get you to sample Bing. But it can’t ensure you’ll like the results once you try it.
That’s the conclusion Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney reached after taking Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin and comparing it to Google’s and Yahoo’s. The result: Google still delivers better results most of the time. In 71 percent of searches, Google either supplied the most relevant answer or tied with other engines. Bing did that 46 percent of the time.
Another vote for the “we’ve seen the worst of the recession” camp: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, talking to reporters at the big advertising festival in Cannes, says the economy should start picking up in a few months.
If this keeps up, I may have to modify my trustworthy “TV ads can’t buy you search share” axiom. Apparently, Microsoft’s gazillion-dollar campaign for Bing is working, at least in the short term: comScore says Microsoft continues to grab search share from Google.
Microsoft is throwing a ton of money into an ad campaign for its Bing search engine, hoping to claw back some share from Google. But I don’t think it’s sinking quite as much into the new ads it’s running for its newish version of Internet Explorer.
You say you’re not convinced by the first TV spot for Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine? Then feast your eyes on these puppies, which AdAge says were supposed to run later this summer but have been moved up because Team Redmond “”realized that the market would be receptive to our product messages sooner than expected.”
Steve Ballmer says he “gulped” when he approved the marketing budget for Microsoft’s new Bing search engine — it’s reportedly in the $100 million range. Here’s where some of that money is going — Microsoft’s new TV ads, which begin running today.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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