Well, hard on the heels of Ask advertising this morning the freebie evening London paper 'Thelondonpaper' has a full back page advert for Windows Live. The advertisement is entitled 'Does the world really need another search engine?' This really does imply that Live.com is brand new and straight out of the box, and it's quite frankly a fairly weak heading; I'd have been tempted with something much stronger myself.
Anyway, the emphasis is on all the fancy tools - 'wouldn't it be good if you could preview images in detail without having to click backwards and forwards to see them?' And '...great if you could control the amount of results you get back using a simple slider bar?' (As an aside, wouldn't 'number of results' read better and make more linguistic sense?) There's also a suggestion that Live can provide better maps and directions, and finishes on 'Live Search... gives you all the personalised tools and controls you need'.
The call to action is 'Give Live Search a try at Live.com'. Interestingly the only mention of Microsoft is down hidden away in the bottom right hand corner. Oh, I almost forgot, with an image of Mr Gates in 3 sizes - a sure fire winner if ever there was one! It's a very defensive advert, almost apologetic in nature, with the emphasis on everything >but< search.
I'd have to say that, of the two, the Ask offering is far more interesting; it's intriguing, slightly amusing, and with an honesty saying 'we know we're not Google, and you know we're not Google, so having got that out of the way let's carry on, shall we?'
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