Bing snags famous reindeer for holiday ads

Like Santa Claus on that one foggy Christmas Eve, Microsoft has summoned Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to guide some precious cargo -- a holiday marketing campaign for its Bing search engine.

The advertisements, debuting online and on TV this week, star Rudolph and other characters from the animated story about the most famous reindeer of all. The campaign is part of Microsoft's attempt to trip up Google Inc., an Internet search rival as imposing as the Abominable Snowman was before Yukon Cornelius tamed the monster.

Google has been countering with its own emotional ads throughout the year. Most of Google's ads show snippets of its dominant search engine and other products at work before swirling into the logo of the company's Chrome Web browser.

The dueling ads underscore the lucrative nature of search engines. Although visitors pay nothing to use them, search engines generate billions of dollars a year in revenue from ads posted alongside the search results.

The holiday season is a particularly opportune time for search companies because that's when people do more searches -- to find gifts online, look for party supplies and plan nights out on the town. That means more people to show ads to. Advertisers also tend to be willing to pay more per ad because they know people are in a buying mode.

To capture that audience, Microsoft and Google are both thinking outside the search box to promote their brands.

Microsoft Corp. licensed the rights to the characters from Rudolph's 47-year-old holiday special after convincing their owners that the Bing commercials would add an endearing chapter to the reindeer's story. The rights to Rudolph and the rest of the cast are owned by the children of Robert L. May, who wrote the story in 1939 while working as a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward department store.

Microsoft has bought seven slots on national TV to run four 30-second ads. The company is going for high impact rather than high frequency and is placing those ads during holiday-themed specials, starting with "The Simpsons" on the Fox network on Thanksgiving night and ending on Dec. 21 during "South Park" on the Comedy Channel. Microsoft isn't buying time during the Rudolph special, though, which CBS is broadcasting next Tuesday and Dec. 10.

The ads also will be shown in more than 200 movie theaters before holiday films and will be available online beginning Wednesday. Microsoft declined to say how much it's spending on the Rudolph campaign.The ads will be a success for Microsoft if they help the company gain more ground and cut its losses in Internet search.

While the Xbox video game console and familiar software such as Windows and Office provide most of Microsoft's earnings, Bing remains a financial drain. The online division anchored by Bing has suffered operating losses totaling $7 billion since June 2008, when Microsoft introduced the latest overhaul of its search engine.