New Bing Ad Spots – Hit or Miss?

Microsoft’s new marketing campaign for Bing is well under way, with several different commercials hitting the airwaves. The “Search Overload” series of commercials features people spouting weird, off-topic phrases in the middle of a conversation – usually in a slightly twitchy manner.

Image: Bing.com Screen Cap

The point? That searches with all kinds of irrelevant results don’t really get us anywhere. However, I’m not sure that these commercials are really getting anywhere. Why?

The first several times I saw or heard the commercials, I wondered about the odd non -sequitur phrases. It seemed strange, but I moved on. There are ad spots on television that routinely cause me to shake my head and these new ads were no different.

I’m not even sure how many of them aired before I realized that they were for Microsoft’s new product. Because I stopped listening to the commercials halfway through. The bursts of unintelligible or random phrases annoyed me and I didn’t care to wait long enough to see what they were for.

So I wonder, if it took a while for me to pay attention to the ads, is it taking others a long time as well? Now that I know what they’re for, it still hasn’t prompted me to use Bing. What about you?

What do you think of the commercials? Love, hate or indifferent? Did you know what product they were for? How long did it take you to pay attention to that?

Here’s one of the ads, with the rest below the fold: