By Andy Atkins-Kruger
The stakes of the game involve money – more money than most of
us can imagine – but that's only the half of it – reputation and
the number one spot are the true goals.
Around a year ago, MSN's attack on the search market became
inevitable with the launch of its own search index and crawler
tools. Then a few months ago they began testing their new paid
search advertising tool "AdCenter" with its launch in English in
Singapore and later in French for the French market. The idea was
to iron out the bugs and prepare to do battle in the key markets of
the US and the UK.
If you were a venture capitalist, you might be prepared to
launch and run a search engine these days just to claim some share
of the rising market – and make some money. European search
engine, Seekport, is doing just that. But this is Microsoft and
Bill Gates we're talking about. From monolith of the PC world, to
also-ran in search, Microsoft is seething with anger at not being
taken seriously enough in the search market.
A large marketing spend to promote MSN search moved its market
share by a barely measurable percentage. It improved and invested
further in its search technology – but still everyone turned to
Google from choice. The team at MSN are visibly frustrated by their
lack of progress at uprooting Google and the apparently blind
loyalty of Google users. Representatives of the company could
barely mask their frustration at the recent webmasterworld
conference in Las Vegas. Quite clearly, they feel that users and
search marketers have not given MSN the credit it deserves for
progress.
Of course there is a third competitor in the market – Yahoo –
which benefits from every paid-for click which takes place at MSN
because they own Overture, the paid-search vehicle which runs the
sponsored links in MSN and Yahoo. All changes once MSN rolls out
its own advertising tool AdCenter – live now in the US and soon to
arrive in the UK. It makes a whole world of difference to
your promotional investment plan if you stand to reap the lion's
share of the resulting advertising revenue – rather than handing a
home goal to another competitor.
Does MSN stand a chance? How are they going to knock Google off
its pedestal?
I met with some of the team from MSN search at the Search Engine
Strategies conference in Chicago and was given a grand tour of the
AdCenter advertising tool. As my American friends would say, it's
"awesome".
MSN aims to leverage its strength in the personal data it holds
from millions of Hotmail or Messenger users to enable more
sophisticated targeting and use of demographics. In auction-style
search, this becomes somewhat complex as the bidder must choose
different levels of bid for different demographics, gender, and
age. The system also provides what's known as a "dayparting"
option whereby you can choose between your ads appearing
within six four-hour slots during the day.
But it is clearly a strong proposition and will give it
advantages within certain market sectors.
Google is aware of the threat and its own weakness in terms of
the knowledge it has of its users – hence the birth of Google Mail,
personalised home pages and Google talk – all gathering demographic
data on users as fast as Google's hard drives will take it. But
Google has a couple of aces up its sleeve.
Right now Google has the audience and some 60–70% of it
depending on whose figures you take. MSN's core weakness is it has
no audience. It's a catch 22 for MSN, it needs the audience to win
the advertisers to drive its system forwards. Meanwhile, Google
clearly perceives the threat as it recently briefed and launched a
European media campaign.
So what happens next?
My view is batten down the hatches – what we've seen so far are
but a few mild skirmishes and it's going to get bloody. MSN is out
to buy audience and to do it quickly – and my new year's prediction
is that those deep pockets of Microsoft and Mr Gates are going
to be raided more deeply than usual. Equally, Microsoft has learned
that it needs to work with partners and with every channel it can
lay its hands on – something they have learned to be good at from a
poor start in the software world.
There will be deals galore – ones which we today don't even
imagine. Big sites with search potential (such as the BBC?) are
going to get cracking deals on their search facilities; engines
we've heard of and many we've not will be swallowed up – anywhere
there's an audience, they'll have it. And there'll be some
big name acquisitions too.
The good news for advertisers and search marketers is that we're
going to be wooed and encouraged to work with MSN. For
Google, which in an unfortunately timed move, recently managed to
upset large slices of the advertising community, this is not mere
swanking and sword waving.
This is war.
Andy Atkins-Krüger was elected President of the Search
Marketing Association, SMA-UK
by its members in June. He is managing director of search marketing
company Web
Certain.
