This was announced recently: “…Our small and medium business brand is changing from “Microsoft Advertising” to “Bing.”” Although it appears that the advertising product will still be called adCenter, it appears that Microsoft is working to brand itself more consistently with the Bing brand. There may be additional strategies at play such as differentiating Microsoft’s online presence from its software presence. As to that, only time will tell.
In the meantime understand that Bing is much more than advertising on the Bing.com search engine. Bing results and Bing advertising is shown on the Yahoo, Bing, and even the Facebook platform. Of additional importance just this past week was Bing’s announcement that throughout the summer they will be rolling out a very tight search integration with Facebook.
From the images released, it appears that when you will search on Bing in the future, Facebook friends faces and comments about a product or place will appear on the left sidebar of your Bing search results page.
All in all, both statements are big news and let us know that in the bigger schemes of search there is some serious consolidation happening behind the scenes between the key social players like Facebook and Microsoft now known as Bing.