Paid search? Targeted ads? Save us from Microsoft

WHAT DO YOU DO when pesky customers won’t use your service just because it isn’t up to the competition's standards and is infested with ads? Why, pay them of course!

Microsoft's plan to offer users rebates on products found with Windows Live Search forms a central part of the Vole’s newly reinvigorated advertising and search strategy. It goes hand in hand with the rollout of mobile ads onto phones and PDAs unfortunate enough to be weighed down by Live services like Messenger and Outlook Express Redux, aka Windows Live Mail.

It seems the prospect of being able to annoy people checking their email on the bus as well as those luddites still getting their interweb delivered by tubes into their houses is one too delicious for Volish strategists to ignore – add some customer bribery into the mix and you have a recipe for a new breed of ultra ads able to follow unwitting consumers down dark alleys and make them offers they can’t refuse.

This utopian vision of a world of unavoidable advertising comes at a time when Microsoft is still a little red in the face from difficult to punctuate web giant Yahoo!’s indifferent reaction to its advances, and teary-eyed at still lagging leagues behind Google in the search department.

Yahoo!, which might have helped Microsoft’s aspirations of becoming almost as popular as the non-evil search behemoth (but not quite), have left the Vole in the same state it was a few months ago, gazing wistfully at the small crowd of Live Search users gradually walking off into the arms of other providers. The burgeoning mobile market only adds to the misery, with the gap between Google and MS being even greater than it is in the home search market (presumably because smart people with Smartphones are more aware of alternatives to the mi ghty rodent). Increasing use of Live Search through rebate incentives, while having the ability to deliver GPS targeted ads to people on the move opens up the path for a revolution in the online advertising landscape. Doesn’t it?

Well, for most folk, probably not.

As the inability of social notworking sites like Facebook and MySpace to generate a healthy ad revenue shows, the general public is not particularly fond of having commercial messages spat at them from corners of the web that are quite reasonably deemed ‘personal’.

Customer receptivity falls greatly when it’s not just your daily tech rag or shelebrity filth-trawling site imploring you to buy something targeted at your own demographic, but the cosy space of your online identity – however dubious that concept may be.

A similar apathy will be seen if, instead of swiftly manoeuvring from calendar to email on your handheld device, your stylus/finger accidentally brushes over one of those godforsaken roll-over ads and you are forced to watch a 10 second clip explaining why you should pop into the Ford dealership around the corner to test drive the latest in suburban off roading monsters. Very few will be swayed by this kind of opportunistic marketing, however dynamic and ‘blue sky’ it seemed at the presentation.

Ads that bother people and encroach into areas less public than the rest of the web will never be able to compete with those in accepted areas of adv ertising discourse. Checking your mail or opening up your IM client will never be deemed acceptable marketing space to place ads, especially when they’re on a platform designed to enable people to get things done when they really need to outside of the office/house.

The necessity Microsoft feels to bribe users with rebates further displays an inability to understand and empathise with those dirty ‘consumers’. Betraying the Volish view of the internet as one giant buying, selling and marketing tool, MS seems able only to imagine more people using Live Search if they’re given some money to do so. Of course, it would make no sense to think people might use it more if it gave decent results and wasn’t so determined to point you to the greatest possible number of products and advertisements.

A Live Search for something current and interesting, for example ‘Indiana Jones’, throws up no less than six out of eleven results on the first page directing you to stuff you can buy. Lego Indy anyone? How about the DVD trilogy box set? In comparison, Google gives you a mix of Wackypedia, IMDB, Youtube trailers and bog posts. It seems pretty clear that the Vole thinks people would only be searching the pensioner-archaeologist’s name because they want to buy his merchandise, while Google assumes people might actually want to know about the character or the film.

Creating a rebate system will only perpetuate this culture, and while it might initially sound good for the companies seeking greater advertising audiences, results will become ever more irrelevant, losing more and more user s. If Vole Search is to survive, it will be through adapting and understanding users’ wishes, not by tossing cash at them. Such subtleties, unfortunately, do not seem forthcoming if Microsoft’s strategy for the near future is anything to go by. µ