If you have a Gmail account and you’ve had email conversations about Bing, or travel, or mentioned a common city name, or used any number of other words, you may have already seen the ads:

If not, perhaps you’ve been searching on the still-wildly-popular search engine, Google. In that case, you may have seen an ad like this while you were looking for that local upholstery shop:

Please take a moment to appreciate the irony of Microsoft paying their biggest rival in search, and on the web, to advertise their own search engine. Have a good chuckle. All right, with that out of the way I think we’re ready to learn something. Something that a lot of companies overlook when it comes to search engine advertising: This is a great way to launch a new brand.

Granted, there are a lot of relevant connection points with consumers on a search engine when your product is also a search engine. The message is simple, “you’re already searching, why don’t you try our search engine?” Still, this technique can be applied to just about any consumer product - or even B2B products or services. Identify the keywords that relate to your product (as many as possible), and then start bidding. The key is coverage. Any time someone is thinking about anything remotely connected to your product, hey, there you are. You’re in their email. You’re on their favorite blogs. You’re on that industry news site. And of course, when they search, there you are.

The nice thing is, while people are likely to see your ad multiple times, they will probably only click once or twice. That means that while your brand is being reinforced again and again, you’re only paying for a fraction of those impressions. Of course, when the consumer does click, you should be ready. The Bing campaign actually launched several days in advance of the search engine, which meant that visitors where met with a “Coming Soon” page if they clicked. Not the best experience. Still, it got me to talk about Bing (and you to read about it), so it must be working.