At the two-minute warning of the NFC Championships last weekend, the country got a glimpse of Bing’s new ad campaign, Bing is for #Doing. Bing just hopes that Gen Y viewers were taking notice.
The spots, which take a storytelling approach and feature adventure sports athletes Kevin Pearce, Bobby Brown, Kaityln Farrington and Gretchen Bleiler, are the beginning of a long-term shift in the Bing advertising strategy — a focus on “doing” versus being “a decision engine,” as well as a continued goal of attracting younger online users.
“When we looked at what would be key, tent-pole types of events that would let us connect with Gen Y, in that entertainment realm, the X-Games came up as a really smart way to connect with that audience and those fans,” said Lisa Gurry, Director of Marketing for Bing, at the Sundance Film Festival Bing Bar yesterday. “It over indexes by about 200 points with the Gen Y audience.”
The first wave of the campaign will include approximately 30 different spots, running throughout the course of the Winter X-Games, January 26-29. Bing is not just utilizing the young athletes as talent for their commercials, but is sponsoring the skiers and snowboarders throughout the next year.
Sunday’s focus on Kevin Pearce as the featured guest at the Bing Speaker Series at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, was an example of this ongoing relationship between the company and the athletes. The snowboarder, who battled back from a critical brain injury and will be featured as a snowboarding analyst at next week’s X-Games, was notified during his Sundance session that his non-profit benefitting brain trauma patients and the University of Utah Medical Center that treated him during his initial battle will be sharing a $100,000 gift from Bing to support their efforts.
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