The big push for Bing you wont see much of here

You may recall that Microsoft launched its new search engine Bing the week before last.  

While my own experiences of the Australian version of Bing haven’t been that great so far, it is a major play by Microsoft and potentially a much needed competitor for Google.

But having had ten days or so to chew on it, it strikes me that Australia isn’t going to play a role in its success or otherwise.

The major piece of evidence is the local approach to marketing of the product.

In the US, JWT has created this as part of a $100m push:

And it’ll then roll out to this rather more amusing iteration:

Whereas the plan for NineMSN (the Australian Nine-Microsoft joint venture) here, is to plug it at the end of Sea Patrol.

At the launch, CEO Joe Pollard said that marketing investment would follow further down the track when localised elements are ready.

Now I’ve had a chance to think about that, it strikes me that there are only two realistic reasons why they’re not going to invest actual money in marketing Bing here.

Either they don’t believe the product is ready for an Australian audience, with results that aren’t yet good enough and many of the functions in the US not available here. Which is plausible.

Or it is good enough, and NineMSN is simply so hard up it cannot afford the marketing budget. Which is also plausible.

Neither one makes me think Google Australia needs to worry anytime soon.

Tim Burrowes