Bing builds a Search Bar with the help of McCann London at AdWeek Europe

McCann London and search engine Bing have constructed the “Bing Search Bar” – a juice bar at AdWeek Europe, where conference goers pay for their refreshments with a search.

The concept of gaining something you really want simply by searching on Bing is a way of bringing to life the principle behind Microsoft Rewards. This unique rewards programme enables users to earn with the everyday searches they make on Bing, which can then be exchanged for the likes of movies, games, apps and more.

For the four days of AdWeek, running between Monday 19 and Thursday 22 March, the “Bing Search Bar” was built to resemble the Bing homepage, with a white search bar (which served as the bar counter) set against a colourful backdrop of rows of juice. Instead of listing the flavour, the label on each bottle poses two intriguing questions relevant to the juice’s ingredients. So, to get the juice, customers had to use Bing to find the answers to the questions, hence the activation tag line “Rewarding your thirst for knowledge”.

This activation supports McCann London’s wider Bing ATL campaign, which focuses on Bing’s other intelligent features such as searching within an image, predictive search, and multi-perspective answers, all designed to reinforce Bing’s positioning as the Intelligent Search Engine. McCann London was awarded the Bing account in July 2017.

Laurence Thomson, co-president and chief creative officer, McCann London, said: “We’re stoked to be working with Bing and wanted to show, in a visually iconic way, a physical manifestation of Microsoft Rewards. With the first search bar that’s an actual bar, as you search you get stuff in return – a little reward and also the information you were looking for. And where better to quench people’s thirst for knowledge than at AdWeek?”