Bing hitches holiday hopes to Rudolph the reindeer

At the Microsoft office in San Fran­cisco, from left, The Abom­inable Snow­man, aka Bum­ble, with Rudolph the Red Nose Rein­deer, Her­mey, and Yukon Cor­nelius, all fig­ures from the ani­mated show Rudolph the Red Nose Rein­deer. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Jeff Chiu)

MICHAEL LIEDTKE

AP Tech­nol­ogy Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — Like Santa Claus on that one foggy Christ­mas Eve, Microsoft has sum­moned Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer to guide some pre­cious cargo — a hol­i­day mar­ket­ing cam­paign for its Bing search engine.

The adver­tise­ments, debut­ing online and on TV this week, star Rudolph and other char­ac­ters from the ani­mated story about the most famous rein­deer of all. The cam­paign is part of Microsoft’s attempt to trip up Google Inc., an Inter­net search rival as impos­ing as the Abom­inable Snow­man was before Yukon Cor­nelius tamed the monster.

Google has been coun­ter­ing with its own emo­tional ads through­out the year. Most of Google’s ads show snip­pets of its dom­i­nant search engine and other prod­ucts at work before swirling into the logo of the company’s Chrome Web browser.

The duel­ing ads under­score the lucra­tive nature of search engines. Although vis­i­tors pay noth­ing to use them, search engines gen­er­ate bil­lions of dol­lars a year in rev­enue from ads posted along­side the search results.

The hol­i­day sea­son is a par­tic­u­larly oppor­tune time for search com­pa­nies because that’s when peo­ple do more searches — to find gifts online, look for party sup­plies and plan nights out on the town. That means more peo­ple to show ads to. Adver­tis­ers also tend to be will­ing to pay more per ad because they know peo­ple are in a buy­ing mode.

To cap­ture that audi­ence, Microsoft and Google are both think­ing out­side the search box to pro­mote their brands.

Although the text ads run­ning along­side search results do a fine job of reel­ing in some cus­tomers, they still lack the broader, more vis­ceral impact of a well-done tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial, said Peter Daboll, chief exec­u­tive of Ace Metrix, a firm that rates the effec­tive­ness of ads.

“It’s instruc­tive that these com­pa­nies who are all about the Inter­net and doing things in real time are actu­ally doing these emo­tive ads on TV,” Daboll said.

Search engines are par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult to sell because the sophis­ti­cated tech­nol­ogy required to make them work isn’t some­thing “you can touch or feel in a store, so you need to bring some emo­tion to it,” said Sean Carver, Bing’s adver­tis­ing direc­tor. “The sto­ry­telling is important.”

Microsoft Corp. licensed the rights to the char­ac­ters from Rudolph’s 47-year-old hol­i­day spe­cial after con­vinc­ing their own­ers that the Bing com­mer­cials would add an endear­ing chap­ter to the reindeer’s story. The rights to Rudolph and the rest of the cast are owned by the chil­dren of Robert L. May, who wrote the story in 1939 while work­ing as a copy­writer at the Mont­gomery Ward depart­ment store (May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, later wrote the famous song).

Microsoft is far more expe­ri­enced at mar­ket­ing than Google.

For one thing, it’s 23 years older than Google, which was founded in 1998.

More impor­tant, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were so con­temp­tu­ous of tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing cam­paigns that the com­pany never both­ered to adver­tise its search engine on national TV until the 2010 Super Bowl. Spend­ing mil­lions to be a part of TV’s annual adver­tis­ing extrav­a­ganza was so out of char­ac­ter that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time, her­alded the Super Bowl ad with a post on Twit­ter that con­cluded “hell has indeed frozen over.”

Since that break­through, Google has caught the adver­tis­ing bug. With­out break­ing down its total ad bud­get, Google dis­closed that it has spent $583 mil­lion more on tele­vi­sion and other adver­tis­ing dur­ing the first nine months of this year than it did at the same time last year.

The invest­ment has won Google some respect in the adver­tis­ing industry.

Google took five of the 10 top spots for most effec­tive national TV ads that pro­mote web­sites, based on Ace Metrix’s study of viewer reac­tions to the com­mer­cials. Top­ping the list is an ad show­ing how a father used Google ser­vices such as Gmail to cre­ate an elec­tronic jour­nal of his daugh­ter Sophie’s life.

Three Bing ads also ranked in the 10 most effec­tive, but it also had two ads on the least effec­tive list.

“There doesn’t seem to be a very coher­ent cre­ative pat­tern to the Bing ads,” Daboll said. “It’s kind of hit and miss.”

There’s no mis­tak­ing the com­mon theme in the four Rudolph ads pro­duced for the Bing pro­mo­tion. The ads are all done in the same stop-motion pup­pet ani­ma­tion used in the orig­i­nal 1964 TV spe­cial. One fea­tures Bum­ble the Abom­inable Snow­man using Bing to get ideas for a more fear­some roar. Another shows some of the char­ac­ters turn­ing to Bing for sug­ges­tions on a vaca­tion that leads to a get­away on an island of mis­fit toys.

Microsoft has bought seven slots on national TV to run those four 30-second ads. The com­pany is going for high impact rather than high fre­quency and is plac­ing those ads dur­ing holiday-themed spe­cials, start­ing with “The Simp­sons” on the Fox net­work on Thanks­giv­ing night and end­ing on Dec. 21 dur­ing “South Park” on the Com­edy Chan­nel. Microsoft isn’t buy­ing time dur­ing the Rudolph spe­cial, though, which CBS is broad­cast­ing next Tues­day and Dec. 10.

The ads also will be shown in more than 200 movie the­aters before hol­i­day films and will be avail­able online begin­ning Wednesday.

Microsoft declined to say how much it’s spend­ing on the Rudolph campaign.

Aaron Lilly, a Microsoft exec­u­tive who helps con­ceive Bing’s pro­mo­tions, came up with the idea to build hol­i­day ads around the Rudolph story two years ago. It didn’t hap­pen then because the Aflac insur­ance com­pany had already bought licens­ing rights to the char­ac­ters for that hol­i­day season.

The ads will be a suc­cess for Microsoft if they help the com­pany gain more ground and cut its losses in Inter­net search, an area that remains weak for Microsoft even after years of invest­ing in bet­ter technology.

While the Xbox video game con­sole and famil­iar soft­ware such as Win­dows and Office pro­vide most of Microsoft’s earn­ings, Bing remains a finan­cial drain. The online divi­sion anchored by Bing has suf­fered oper­at­ing losses total­ing $7 bil­lion since June 2008, when Microsoft intro­duced the lat­est over­haul of its search engine.

Google’s share of the Inter­net search mar­ket has increased since Bing’s debut, accord­ing to the research firm com­Score. Google now processes about two out of three search requests in the U.S. and rakes in an even larger share of the rev­enue that rolls when peo­ple click on ads next to search results.

Bing’s mar­ket share has climbed from about 9 per­cent in June 2008 to roughly 15 per­cent in Octo­ber, but most of those gains have come at the expense of Yahoo Inc., which hired Microsoft to run most of its search tech­nol­ogy two years ago.

For Google, the ads are aimed at not only main­tain­ing its dom­i­nance in search but also dri­ving adop­tion of other Google prod­ucts, includ­ing its Chrome browser. Google says Chrome now has 200 mil­lion users world­wide, up from about 120 mil­lion at the end of last year. Despite those gains, Chrome still trails Microsoft’s Inter­net Explorer and the Mozilla’s Firefox.

But Chrome has been able to nar­row the gap sep­a­rat­ing it from Inter­net Explorer more than Bing has been able to do in its pur­suit of Google in search. Bing is still hop­ing to emu­late Rudolph, a one-time laugh­ing­stock who over­came the skep­tics to leap of the front of the pack.

Posted by AP News on Nov 23 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.