- Microsoft has begun to showcase ad formats within the OpenAI-powered new Bing search engine.
- Some ads will appear like clickable annoations within Bing’s conversational response to a prompt.
- Advertisers said they still have unanswered questions about how ads will be targeted to users.
Microsoft has begun to give advertisers the first glimpse of what ads will look like in the new Open AI-powered Bing search engine, as it looks to translate the hype it’s built around the generative AI chatbot into a sizeable new revenue stream.
Over the past month, Microsoft Advertising has held “roadshow” events around the world, as well as private meetings, with advertisers and agencies to showcase some of the new Bing ad formats it is testing, ad industry sources tell Insider.
The new Bing encourages users to give it more conversational prompts than most people would traditionally use in search. As well as a normal search results page with a list of website links, the AI chatbot also attempts to succinctly answer questions or tasks like “help me plan a trip to Rome” or “recommend a three-course dinner menu.”
A search for, “What’s better for kids; Tenerife or Fuerteventura?,” for example would bring up an answer with several annotations that reference where the chatbot got its information. One of those clickable annotations, such as a link to book a flight, could also be an ad and would be marked with a label, agency sources who attended meetings with Microsoft Advertising said.
A slide from a Microsoft Advertising roadshow event held in Amsterdam in March.
Dennis Westerbeek
Advertisers can’t currently buy ads specifically on the new Bing chatbot; their current Bing ad campaigns will extend to the chatbot automatically, agency sources said. Similarly, the reporting data advertisers receive about the search keywords that drove visits to their websites will be bundled and they won’t initially receive separate reports for the new Bing service, according to an agency source.
Text ads, multimedia ads, product ads, and vertical ads will all be eligible to extend to the new Bing chat, without the need to create separate campaigns, a different agency exec said.
Agency sources said they still had unanswered questions about how ad targeting will work on the Bing chatbot service — such as whether ads are served based on a user’s query, and data about the user themselves, or on the AI-generated content in the chat results.
Dennis Westerbeek, a senior digital advertising marketer at digital ad agency Adwise, was excited when he saw the new search ads.
Westerbeek, who attended a Microsoft Advertising roadshow in Amsterdam, said he was also impressed that the new Bing had reached 100 million daily active users. “This indicates that people are shifting to Microsoft and thus giving advertisers the opportunity to reach more potential customers through their platform,” he said.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Microsoft is hoping to rapidly commercialize the consumer attention that Bing — and its multibillion dollar investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — has garnered in recent months.
The $112 billion search market is dominated by Google, which captures more than 90% of searches. Microsoft has previously said it can add $2 billion in revenue for every percentage point of search it gains. Google is also working on its own AI-powered conversational search service, dubbed Bard, though the company hasn’t yet shared details on it.
Microsoft also believes it will be able to charge more for ads on the new Bing because the AI tech will help create more personalized search results — and therefore more relevant ads.
“While the user may see fewer ads, they will be of higher value to advertisers,” said Philippe Ockenden, Microsoft’s cvp of finance, on a call with analysts last month.
