Microsoft Kicks Off $100M Bing TV Ad Campaign

Microsoft has officially kicked off its $100 million dollar Bing.com advertising campaign. Beginning today you will begin seeing Microsoft's advertising for its new search engine across a wide-range of media formats such as; Social Networks, TV, Print, and other outlets.

On Monday, we got an early sneak peak of Bing.com and what all it has to offer. We found some interesting things about the new search engine such as;

Bing Shopping - A nice service that rewards you for using it and purchasing products found on the Bing.com web site. It does a very good job at providing all of the results, much better than Google's Product Search IMO.

Bing xRank - With this Bing tool, you have the ability of seeing the top searched for keywords. It's very similar to Google Trends but we still like Google's version much better than Bing's.

Bing Video - The revamped video search on Bing performs very well. We especially liked the preview feature where a video begins playing in a thumbnail view automatically when you hover your mouse over it. Bing has Google Video beat hands down with this.

Bing Travel - This was the last product that we looked at and took an even further look at in more detail yesterday. With Bing Travel, you can get quick prices on flights and Bing even tells you when to buy the ticket for the best possible price.

Microsoft certainly has a lot to advertise and a lot of information to provide the consumer in the way of advertising. One of the Microsoft Bing ad's already appeared on YouTube:

This is one of the television ads that will run for the next two weeks, very heavily. If you don't see it on TV, you're probably living under a rock - or maybe on the Internet too much :)

The ads will first appear on CSI: New York and So You Think You Can Dance. It will then spread on to other prime time spots across different networks.

In July, Microsoft will run more specialized TV ads that are geared towards the specific products of Bing such as Bing Travel, Bing Shopping, Bing News, and so on. Obviously, these Bing products will be marketed towards different audiences across the U.S.

What are your thoughts on the Microsoft ad campaigns? Do you think it will help Microsoft gain market share for its new search engine?