The current advertising formats have been in place since Microsoft launched its AI-powered Bing search engine in limited preview in February, Sainsbury-Carter said, but the company has not widely communicated how the new tech changes its advertising business until now.
Microsoft also announced that it is moving its AI-chat product from limited preview to open preview and eliminating the waitlist for trial, in the hope of expanding the product’s user base. Microsoft also debuted a slew of new generative AI-enabled features throughout Bing.
Bing has grown to more than 100 million daily active users, the company said, a third of whom use the AI chat daily. Daily installs of the Bing mobile app have increased fourfold since February and the introduction of its AI-powered search.
Working with the advertising community
So far, ad products within Microsoft’s chat AI will operate under the same auction dynamics as Bing search auctions, meaning advertisers won’t necessarily see an inflated cost per click. The search engine is also keeping ad load within chats low to start, Sainsbury-Carter said.
It’s making us think about Microsoft more than we did in the past.
Aaron Levy, vp of search, Tinuiti
Microsoft is currently having conversations with advertisers to flesh out the next steps, and is hosting several “envisioning sessions” with agencies.
From those meetings, which began in April, the platform has learned that advertisers are interested in visually rich, immersive advertising experiences, more automation to learn the best place to serve an ad in real time and formats that lend themselves to shoppable experiences, including visual comparison layouts or shop-the-look formats, Sainsbury-Carter said.
Marketers welcome the measured approach, although expect temporary hiccups, especially if chats don’t convert as well as traditional search.
“To make the ad units perform is going to take a lot of tweaking,” said Aaron Levy, vp of search at performance marketing agency Tinuiti. “What they’ve done now makes sense. I can’t imagine it’s going to stay there.”
And because advertisers currently view Bing as a performance product, the bar will be higher for success.
“The gambit of chat as a branding vehicle…I don’t see advertisers [thinking] that, nor do they have an option to do that because you can’t buy specifically for the chat UI,” said Michael Cohen, evp of performance media services at Horizon Media. “It kind of has to be driven by performance.”