Today,I went to Microsoft’s Live Search again (after a really long time),just to take a look at the latest marketing stint they are upto.And it seems that the marketing folks at MS,India are experimenting some cheap but innovative ways to market their doomed search engine(and it’s still doomed).
Talking straight, Microsoft, India has just launched an online marketing campaign called WinWithSearch where Indian users will get to win talktime worth Rs.100 ($2) every 10 minutes of doing nothing but searching.
Every search you make will trigger two dice at the top of search results page the dice will start rolling.A few seconds after,when both the diceswill come to rest,you will be declared a winner of FREE talktime,only if you get a combination of 6-6 in both the dices.And there will only be one winner every ten minutes.
This one month campaign(it will end on Jan 3,2009) is mainly intended to attract more and more people for experiencing their stack of search features that have been recently implemented on Live search.
As they are giving away Rs.100($2) every 10 mins till Jan 3,2009,so they are going to spend Rs.4.3 lac(100x6x24x30) or $8770 during the entire course of campaign.That’s why,it’s a cheap yet innovative method of bringing more users to their search engine.
And guess what…When i went to check out this campaign,i got the 6-6 winning combination within first try.(it was a junk,meaningless search by the way).They further told me to give them my number where i wanted the talktime to get loaded.
And now they’re two reasons behind my skepticism on this campaign
(1) As per my past experiences,my luck can’t be so strong so the only possibility in my “one shot win” left is that the search volume(from India) on Live search could be just too small(few hundreds at a time) that i hit bull’s eye at first go.
(2) It’s more than 12 hrs from the time i won and no balance has yet been credited to the number i provided them.I hell care about $2(Rs.100) of balance credit but the issue is more of a moral one.(they can’t make fake promises to their users).
Anyways,hope this delay does not occur with other folks otherwise this innovative campaign will even crush the current credibility(for being a “Microsoft” product) of Live Search in India .