Bing Gets a Jingle

By  |  Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 11:36 pm

Bing LogoI just this very moment formulated a new theory about search engines: It may be impossible to do good TV-style advertising for them. They’re free, you can try them at will, and if they’re not pretty self-explanatory, they’ve failed from the get-go. All of which makes it hard to spend thirty seconds saying anything useful about them.

With that in mind, my instinct is not to judge the user-generated Bing jingle video that won Microsoft’s contest too harshly. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler compares it to Hell; I just find it…odd. (Possibly intentionally so, and odd in a catchy way, at least.) And except for the fact that the lyrics wouldn’t scan, it could be about any other search engine on the planet, from Google to a tenth-stringer like Mamma.

(I’m not going to stoop for criticizing the ad for the fact that the queries shown, such as “Learn to dance like Jonathan,” don’t provide useful results in Bing or any other search engine.)

Also looking on the bright side: It’s nowhere near as odd and ineffective as years and years of Ask.com ads that cost that company way, way more money than the $500 that Microsoft paid its contest winner.

Ask.com

Another plus: Bing’s new singing, dancing spokesman doesn’t vomit onscreen.

(Full disclosure: Bing is an advertiser on this site, and I’m a contributor to the Bing-sponsored BingTweets.)

 
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3 Comments For This Post

  1. Mike Cerm Says:
    August 6th, 2009 at 3:39 am

    MG Siegler embarrasses himself and Techcrunch with every post he writes. He lavishes praise on everything that Apple does, and hates everything done by Apple’s competitors. Naturally, he would have harsh words for anything that Microsoft was associated with.

    Unfortunately, in this case he’s right that, like all of this guy’s song-a-day songs, the performance and production are each unspeakably bad. However, the tune is slightly catchy, and if it were to be reworked and developed into a real jingle for a real ad campaign, it could be alright.

  2. no Says:
    August 7th, 2009 at 1:25 am

    Bing loses my interest IMMEDIATELY when I go to their site and the first thing I get is a search field stuck in the middle of a stupid “picture of the day”.

    I went there for a search. Not to look at pretty god damn pictures.

  3. no Says:
    August 7th, 2009 at 1:31 am

    Also, while I may have played with every search engine under the sun for a few days here and there, I started with Yahoo! in 1996, moved to Google in around 1999 and have stuck with google ever since. After a decade with one search engine, you’re going to have to devise something pretty damn amazing, useful, fantastic and unbelievable to get someone to switch. And you’re going to have to do it without sinking to the typical Yahoo! or Microsoft way of doing things (which is to clutter your experience up with so many features and advertisements and services that you don’t want that you can’t even find the damn search bar or your results in the pile of crap on the screen).