Google has launched its first global advertising campaign in a bid to take on rival Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The ‘Gone Google’ campaign has been launched in London, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, and Singapore.
The campaign expansion comes just days before Microsoft begins a massive marketing push to promote the October 22 launch of Windows 7.
Google launched the "Gone Google" campaign in August in four US cities San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Boston to promote its growing enterprise business and its efforts appear to have produced results.
During Google's Q3 2009 earnings conference last week, CEO Eric Schmidt said that the company's enterprise business is accelerating and that customer feedback has been strong. He acknowledged that product shortcomings need to be addressed and he suggested that Google is considering the acquisition of small companies that could enhance Google's enterprise offerings.
The global advertising push in somewhat surprising for the search engine King and signals the heated up competition the giant is receiving from Bing and Yahoo. Google famously built its global business using little to no advertising in the past.
This campaign is being run by Google Enterprise, the division which houses products for business use, Google apps such as Google Mail, Google Docs, calendar, Google Maps and Google Earth and digital security services .
The campaign line "Gone Google" refers to the 1.7 million businesses that the company claims have embraced its services. The ads also use straplines including "Day 9: Email inbox is full. Grrr!!! Go Google?", and "Day 15: Attaching documents is so 1990s. Go Google?".
The campaign consists of 21 different ads that will run over 28 days. The UK campaign will run across media such as outdoor billboards, digital locations in train stations including Paddington and Liverpool Street, and print ads in titles such as the Economist and Daily Telegraph. An online campaign will run across websites including Silicon.com, FT.com and Times Online.