Microsoft News Tracker

Back in 2005, Bill Gates suggested that Microsoft might provide financial rewards to attract search users,  but the devil is, as always, in the details. You can’t pay for raw numbers of searches, because the scammers would be all over it and the Live Search Club games of last summer had a similar problem. Now according to the Seattle PI’s Todd Bishop, Microsoft is set to try again with the announcement of an incentivized shopping promotion called Live Search cashback which only pays if you buy products from selected retailers. The somewhat oldtimey slogan is ‘Microsoft Live Search cashback is “The Search That Pays You Back”.’

The basic idea is that you “search for cashback deals at Live Search cashback” and if you buy, Microsoft will put an incentive payment of some percentage of the purchase price into your “cashback account” which you can withdraw in cash. What keeps it from being merely an incentive shopping site is that if you perform a regular search at Live Search, available cashback deals will be flagged with a little gold coin/dollar sign icon.

Microsoft has apparently signed up a number of major retailers and is presumably making the incentive payment out of a sales commission paid by them. The incentivized shopping model is hardly new, but what is new is that it is being associated with a legitimate search engine. While I hope participation in the program doesn’t affect the rankings of search results, the suspicion always is that by mixing search results and what are effectively paid ads, the search engine is stacking the deck. More may be known when the formal announcement is made later today.

Update: The speculation is that this is based on the technology Microsoft received last year when they acquired the Jellyfish comparison shopping site which had promised to “SHARE at least half of every $1 we earn when you shop and buy products using Jellyfish.com.” Also per the FAQ, you have to be a US resident to participate.

Update: The formal announcement doesn’t add much to the above. Some stats:

The complete Live Search cashback product portfolio includes more than 10 million product offers from more than 700 merchants, including more than 13 of the top 40 U.S. retailers.

Microsoft also announced Live Search Farecast for finding travel deals. It uses the technology acquired with Farecast in April.

I always like stories about the advertising business. The characters are strange, their ways are weird, and if you didn’t occasionally encounter the work product, you might think they were merely comedies of manners. Anyway, another entry in the genre is Danielle Sacks’ Fast Company article, Can Alex Bogusky help Microsoft Beat Apple? which lightly recounts the development of an upcoming ad campaign for Microsoft by "bad boy" ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

It isn’t spelled out explicitly in the article, but Microsoft has many advertising campaigns for its many products and the one in question is a $300 million exercise in consumer product branding. That seems to cover Zune, Xbox, Windows Live, and even Vista, but we won’t know until about July when the campaign is rumored to start. It is the nature of the beast that most advertising campaigns fall flat, but it will be interesting to see what vaunted purveyors of corporate "cool"  like Crispin Porter + Bogusky can come up with. They certainly can’t do worse than what has passed for Zune advertising.