Unusual marketing techniques

Not sure why it struck me enough to want to blog about, but while listening to Kathy Griffin’s interview with Howard Stern today she used the phrase, “Bing it”. It’s the first time I heard someone use the phrase and it did actually sound pretty natural. Most people use Google and you often here people say “Google it” or “look it up on Google”.

I have heard in the past that Kathy Griffin often gets paid for dropping different company names when doing interviews, and it does make sense for a company to pay celebrities to use these types of phrases during interviews. I wouldn’t have thought of her promoting Bing or them paying for this type of marketing, but it would be smart of them to do so. Getting a company name used in this way is possible the best type of advertising.

Whether Kathy was paid for the name drop, while interesting, is actually not even as big of a deal as the fact that she did it. If it was natural (unpaid / organic even), then to me this is a big sign that Bing is making some real progress. If it was paid, then it is a sign that Bing is not messing around.

With all of the changes at Google lately, they better really be working hard to make sure people are finding what they want when they go to Google. In my mind, this marks the real arrival of Bing as a contender.