Do a search, get a check!
A few decades ago baseball wise guy Joe Garagiola shilled for a car company with the famous slogan: "Buy a car, get a check!" The ad first ran as a Super Bowl halftime commercial on Jan. 12, 1975, and car buyers were promised a $200 rebate check when they bought a new Chrysler.
That's far more than anyone will ever get from Bill Gates and his new offer to "pay" people for doing searches on the Microsoft Live Search network.
The what? That's right, Microsoft actually has a search engine. At least for now. The Live Search CashBack model, announced by Gates at the Microsoft Advance '08 confab, will have an advertiser determining the cost it is willing to pay to sell a product via Live Search. Instead of MS getting the money when a customer clicks on the search ad and makes a purchase, it offers the fee back to the consumer in the form of a rebate. In essence, MS won't make any money on the ads.
Gates went on to say that in a few years, "we can look back and say search started to get a fair bit more competitive and we can look back to this announcement."
Expect advertisers to flock to this third-rate search engine. (Not really).
What I suspect WILL happen, though, is a new partnership between MS and Yahoo that involves the Y search technology. Perhaps it will be leveraged across all the MS Web properties, extending the Y search brand a teeny bit further.
Stay tuned...and don't quit your day job.
You can read more on the Gates search rebate announcement at Ad Age.
