Also, the Bing campaign's take-away argument, that online users are suffering from "search overload," flirts with a kind of information totalitarianism. "Less is the new more," Microsoft's general manager for advertising, Gayle Troberman, told AdAge. That sounds alarmingly like "The choice is the burden."
Anyway, can we start a betting pool on when the phrase "decision engine" dies choking on its own inanity? I'm putting a sawbuck on July 22.
"Manifesto," apparently, hasn't polled well in the Iowa caucus and there are reports Microsoft may have already pulled it, which, if true, would represent a staggering misfire. The other Bing ad, "Syndrome," is better. At least it's funny. It comprises a series of rapid-fire vignettes in which characters pick up on random (key)words in conversation and spit out irrelevant answers. A man in a TV showroom asks his son: "Do we want an LCD or plasma?" And the son answers, in a kind of info-Tourettes: "Plasma is an ionized gas." A woman at a doctor's office asks about her back pain and the receptionist asks, "Backpacking, back to school, Johann Sebastian Bach?"
Cute. But the "Syndrome" ad amounts to an elaborate and entertaining straw-man argument. Generally speaking, a search engine's results are only as good as the query. In my experience, if I ask Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com the right question I get the right answer, usually on the first results page. I'd wager that most users' online search experience is quite satisfying. An ad that suggests that online search is now a sea of frustration is going to strike viewers as weird and inauthentic.
From a marketing perspective, Bing has three problems -- two, once they jettison these manic ads. One is that Google emerged a decade ago as a fully formed, fully functional search engine, and it has gotten only better since. Google isn't a branded search engine, a website to be competed with. It's a utility, like the water or gas company. It's an institution, a verb. Google's incumbency is enormous.
The other problem is rather more conceptual. Bing's pitch -- fewer, more focused query results -- tends to foreclose the "happy accident," the common experience of searching for one thing and discovering, learning, or buying something completely unexpected. You search for "maps to the stars' homes" and wind up shopping for a telescope. This quality of surprise and delight is what makes the Internet an inspiring place and not just a dreary electronic storefront.
Microsoft and Google. Oy vey. To referee the advertising between them feels like stepping between two hair-pulling, scratch-your-eyes-out high school girls who happen to be 50 feet tall. But I should note that Microsoft's ads never mention Google by name -- an omission that seems only to underscore the idea that "Google" and "search engine" are synonymous.
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dan.neil@latimes.com
