What’s Google’s fatal flaw? Microsoft spending $100M to call it out

AdAge reports that Microsoft has budgeted up to $100 million to advertise Bing, its yet-unlaunched search engine, on TV, on radio, online and in print. The Bing campaign is so big that ad agency JWT has hired additional creative staff, according to AdAge.

Getting customers to switch from Google will be tough. Internal Google tests found that most users favored results branded with the Google logo, even when Google swapped logos with another search engine to serve supposedly inferior results under its own brand.

What’s Bing like? The site isn’t live yet. No one seems able to nail down the difference between Bing and Google in one simple sentence. AdAge says:

People who’ve seen the Microsoft product suggest it’s useful and has some nifty filtering tools, even though it’s not a markedly different-looking interface, at least for text search (some of the multimedia search results, however, do look quite different from how Google currently displays them).

To convince Google users to try another brand of search, especially from perpetually uncool Microsoft, JWT’s new creative staff will need not only to differentiate Bing from Google, but to find a flaw in Google’s brand armor that can be cracked open.

It’s not impossible.  AdAge reports that Microsoft’s recent “I’m a PC” ads, which directly targeted Apple, have damaged Apple’s value perception among the kind of young adults who buy Macs. But Apple had a conspicuous weakness: High prices during a frightening recession. It’ll be interesting to see how JWT answers the question: What’s Google’s fatal flaw?

[Image from LucasFilm]