David RichardsMicrosoft Australi,a who has under 8% of the search market in Australia but growing marketshare for their Bing search engine in the USA, is looking for a local advertising agency in an effort to increase their share up against Google who have the lions share of the Australian market.
The US company has asked five competing agencies to handle creative and strategic duties, with a decision expected by the end of the month.
Bing was launched locally in 2009 as part of a joint venture between Microsoft and Ninemsn after the software giant rebranded its MSN and Live Search search engine as Bing.
Last month saw the biggest month-over-month increase in its share of the Internet search market in the USA with Bing climbing to 13.1% of the U.S. search market in January.
According to Comscore the increase in market share appeared to come at the expense of Google which saw its share decline to 65.6% in January from 66.6% at December 2010.
Ninemsn marketing manager Kurt Fulepp told AdNews: “This will mark the company’s first major marketing push.” Additional funds will be allocated to Bing, and there will be a big marketing focus for the search engine in 2011.