Bing, Goo And You- The Battle Continues

Posted by Hersh Bhardwaj in Marketing Current Affairs | 3 comments

The three internet giants are posed to lock horns once again. Although Google chooses to focus mostly on ‘producing quality’, Yahoo and Microsoft are going to realign their brands with new marketing campaigns. Yahoo has already launched a $61 million brand campaign, which will be released over the next 15 months. Its strapline is- ‘Its You’.

With the arrival of Bing and a search-partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo, the two brands have been seriously planning ways to re-brand themselves. Bing’s expensive marketing campaign is on its way soon too. Looks like they are planning to hit big G from different angles.

Google came up with a ‘next-generation architecture for web-search’. They are not in a hurry to splash on big budget brand campaigns as yet. But you never know, as they say.

Online-Ad spend has risen to 15% of all forms of advertising spend. This is the largest chunk from the mix and has grown even during the recession. Google dominates this. This ever-increasing revenue source is what the three giants are after. More searches, more accurate searches, even more searches, and, even more advertisers (paid search).

• In Yahoo-Microsoft deal, Yahoo allows Bing to do searches. So, yahoo has backed-out from trying to build a better search engine and bring-in more searchers. Even though yahoo gets 88 cents to dollar from Bing at present, what’ the future?




• While Bing tries to perfect its search engine, will yahoo be just trying to work on added services? What happens when Bing becomes as good as (if not better than) Google and decides to leave Yahoo’s search page?




• If Bing and Yahoo are forming a tactical alliance against Google, shouldn’t they be attacking the giant from two different strategic angles? Yahoo has launched the branding campaign with ‘you’-centric message. It remains to be seen what Bing comes up with?




• The most important factor of Yahoo-Bing alliance is their access to user data. Its unclear who gets what level of user info, but they both are set to gain tremendous insights because of the treaty that combines their search traffic stream. If this doesn’t give them an edge in enhancing their search, what will?