The Bingifesto.

I just saw JWT's manifesto for Microsoft's new search engine--oooops, discovery engine, and I am shaking my head. Not because the spot sucks, which it does, but because the spot is so utterly superfluous. http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137044 Read about it and see it at the above link.

Here's what I mean.

If bing is a dramatic improvement to Google, news of its betterness will quickly spread. And they will spread in ways that are way more cost effective than a :60-second manifesto. If bing isn't significantly enough better than Google, the greatest spot in the world will do nothing to change consumer behavior. I'm not saying that advertising doesn't work and that the product is the only thing that matters. What I am contending is that Google users are entrenched. They love the brand and the product. They probably don't feel the same way about either Microsoft or yet another inflated promise about solving a problem they don't know they have. Does the bing manifesto give people a reason to try, a reason to switch? Naw. It's just a lot of zeitgeist blather. And I think we're all suffering, frankly, from zeitgeist overload.

Here's a decade-old spot for alta vista which used to be a search engine. (Maybe it still is.) I happen to like it. It's better than any spot I've ever seen google run. A lot of good it did for alta vista.