MSN Search Doing Heavy Advertising

Just received this in my email:

I wanted to make you aware of the beginning of a phased marketing campaign to promote Microsoft Live Search. As mentioned, Microsoft has heavily invested in the development of our Live Search product and we’re launching various marketing campaigns to generate awareness and gain share over time. The information below provides additional information about our initial campaign.

We are beginning the next major phase in the launch of Live Search with an acquisition campaign involving both print and online advertising, so we wanted make sure you were aware of what was happening, and also take a moment to update you on how we are doing on executing the Live Search launch plan.

Today we start a significant customer acquisition campaign for Live Search. There are plenty of details below, but you will want to look for our online ads throughout the web and our print ads running in the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, USA Today and the local papers.

The campaign launching today builds on the momentum of the successful MSN migration and expands the target audience beyond loyalists to what we call sharers – people who use our services like mail and MSN channels, but have not heavily adopted Live Search. We’re starting with an introductory phase to build awareness of our new Live Search service. We then quickly move into a direct response phase where we drive people into the Live Search service itself to experience all of the great innovations and features we have spent so much effort building. The campaign starts with a bang on Oct 27 (look for it in your newspaper, MSN homepage, Hotmail, and Microsoft.com), which will include online advertising through the end of March, and sustained strategic online programs through the end of the year.

We will be building awareness using both print media as well as highly targeted, contextual online placements that aim to connect with people at the right time and place for them to consider a new search engine.

Online: Our efforts here will be focused on connecting with consumers at appropriate life moments and through highly contextual placements. For life moments, we have chosen to focus on Travel and Health and will be deploying custom advertising vehicles on the Everyday Health Network, Reuters, the Away Network, and Weatherbug that will demonstrate how Live Search can help with the topic being investigated by driving them to the Live Search service that’s appropriate for their topic.

Print: For the print campaign, we will have full-page print ads in the Wall St. Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post Intelligencer starting tomorrow. These ads will run three times in each publication over a one week period.