When Microsoft and Bell ended their five-year partnership earlier this month and dissolved the portal Sympatico.MSN.ca, the media largely presented it as a divorce. It wasn’t the best of metaphors as the two companies are still linked by a three-year deal to share traffic, search and e-mail technologies. They’re more like friends who grew up together but are now after the same girl.
The object of their affection is number-one Canadian market share position and the millions of ad dollars that come with it. Both agree it will take page views to entice this elusive beau. Together they managed 18.5 million unique views a month. How will those numbers change now that surfers have the option of either Symptico.ca or MSN.ca–or both?
Bell’s Sympatico portal has inertia on its side both from an audience and advertiser perspective. Visitors to the old URL will automatically get redirected to Sympatico.ca, which looks virtually identical and has all the same content as the old site. Advertisers are used to dealing with Bell’s ad sales staff, who handled sales for the joint project. The campaigns that were booked prior to the division remain with Bell.
All that translates to minimum disruption to routine, which can go a long way. Bell will launch a consumer campaign before the end of the year, but for now its marketing efforts are targeting advertisers.
“[Consumers] can’t grasp what a portal is,” says Gary Anderson, Bell vice-president in charge of Sympatico, so why promote it that way? Instead, Anderson has gone to the B2B audience with a message of minimal disruption.
On the other side of the fence, Microsoft must train web audiences to type in its new URL, or spread its content far and wide to reel visitors back to the MSN.ca mothership through links and word-of-mouth. The MSN name and butterfly logo has a lot of caché though, and it’s being pasted across all media by a new consumer campaign from Taxi Montreal.
The campaign sells the portal as social currency, keeping people in-the-know by providing info and insight into a variety of topics (or, as MSN calls them, verticals) such as sports, finance and games.
Microsoft has hired about 40 ad sales staff, revamped its still nascent Advertising.Microsoft.ca, and has started its own B2B blitz to make sure Canadian advertisers and agencies know they’re out there.
Where Microsoft does have the edge with advertisers is through its international partnerships. The only ad relationships it managed through the defunct joint portal were global campaign partnerships, such as the Chanel No. 5 relaunch in May. A global ad network is a handy crutch to have while the Canadian operation finds its feet.
“We’ve got a breadth and depth of relevant opportunities across a bigger set of platforms with a bigger audience than anybody else,” says Owen Sagness, vice-president, general manager of consumer and online at Microsoft Canada. “Think about PC, mobile, web–[Microsoft] covers the entire spectrum of lifestyle choices out there today.”
Bell also has a multi-platform offering with its cable television, Internet, mobile and home phone products, but Microsoft has its own reach with search marketing (including new search engine Bing), an exclusive ad deal with Facebook and its Massive in-game ad network places brands in the ever-growing video game market.
Even Bell recognizes it can’t touch Microsoft’s gaming know-how; the Game tab on Sympatico’s front page links directly to MSN Games.
There’s nothing stopping the 18.5 million former fans from visiting both sites. Quality content in specific verticals will likely pull audiences back and forth between brands, with advertisers finding adjacency with the most popular destinations at any given time.
