Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2013; it reports news from that month. The campaign later ran under the name Scroogled, and Google announced in 2017 that it would stop scanning Gmail content to personalise ads; the article reflects neither development.
Microsoft is planning to take on Google once again, this time bringing out the heavy artillery with television and print ads. The aim of this new attack, which many consider pathetic, is simply to trigger a mass exodus of Gmail users to Microsoft’s own email service.
Microsoft’s attack targets the way Google scans emails in Gmail to pick out keywords and use them to target the ads we see in its webmail service.
According to Microsoft, Gmail users don’t know that Google uses this system, or that their emails are scanned for those keywords, and once they find out they will object and look for an alternative.
It’s a poor strategy on Microsoft’s part, because I think most users are well aware of Google’s ad targeting by now. Microsoft will imply that online privacy is under threat.
With its destructive campaign, Microsoft will try to get many users to picture Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with all their staff, reading every single one of our emails to insert the ads, when in reality it is bots that do the scanning, with the sole purpose of showing ads matched as closely as possible to our tastes.
We shouldn’t forget that Google provides thousands of services completely free of charge, and obviously it needs to generate revenue somehow to keep offering them at no cost to users. To my mind, that is logical and normal, and in this respect Microsoft is no slouch either.
In the video below you can see an earlier Microsoft campaign that made fun of Gmail. It was funny enough, but it didn’t have the effect Microsoft wanted on users: Gmail has kept on growing its user base.
Featured image: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
