If you want to take down a competitor, play the little guy picking a fight with the big guy. You won’t eat them whole, but you’ll slowly chip away at their credibility one piece at a time. Microsoft’s ‘Scroogled‘ campaign, while somewhat polarizing, seems to be serving Microsoft’s purposes quite well. Hilariously, Microsoft’s the little guy in this fight. Who saw that one coming?
An article published by AdAge highlights some of the key campaign strategies and points out that the advertisement is actually quite successful.
An unnamed source gives AdAge some hard numbers:
Once viewers do hit Scroogled.com, data collected for Microsoft by GfK Roper Poll show a 45% favorability gap in favor of Google contracting to just 5%. And Microsoft’s internal data, collected up until this summer, show the likelihood of someone recommending Google to a friend drop by 10%, as opposed to a 7% increase for Bing, after watching the ad.
I think they’re great. All’s fair in love and war. Let’s be real, in this industry it’s all or nothing, sink or swim, and every other stupid adage in the book. Apple did it and look where it got them. It’s a pretty clever marketing strategy.
