Microsoft moves its SMB advertising brand under the Bing aegis

And you thought that Microsoft would take break from moving its divisions around. Ha. The company has announced that its advertising teams are undergoing a very telling change: “Today […] our small and medium business brand is changing from ‘Microsoft Advertising’ to ‘Bing.'”

The company called the move a ‘simplification’ of how “SMB search advertising customers do business with Microsoft.” Here’s what we think is going on: Microsoft wants advertisers to interact more with the Bing brand. There’s no real point in having two different brands that advertisers have to work with, which could lead to less total business being executed.

So, by having companies work with just Bing, things are simpler, more streamlined, and, of course, it can’t hurt Bing. Bing loses oodles of money (more on that here), and so any attempt to boost its revenues is one worth taking. This is likely a play along those lines.

In its blog post about the change, Microsoft touted the size of Bing:

With one ad buy through Microsoft Advertising adCenter, search advertisers are able to reach 158 million unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo! Search (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites), providing a sizable volume of 5.6 billion monthly searches and a 29% search share, which is nearly one-third of all queries in the U.S.

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That’s nearly a search per month for every person alive today. Essentially, Microsoft is arguing that its search property is too big to ignore, that anyone who buys search ads has to address Bing, as it is now so big, partially through its Yahoo! partnership.

Finally, Microsoft hinted that there’s more to come:

 As always, your feedback is appreciated as we continue to invest in improving the experience Microsoft provides our search advertising customers. Stay tuned.

I’m hearing the same. Expect more Bing in the coming week.