Microsoft to Launch New Search Engine With Huge Ad Campaign

A new report by AdAge says that Microsoft will begin a major ad campaign to launch its new search engine, Bing.

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That's a big campaign -- big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

The ad campaign was created by JWT and will utilize online, TV, print and radio. The ads apparently don't target Google or Yahoo; rather, they will focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems.