According to statistics, Microsoft’s Scroogled advertising campaign is effectively tarnishing rival company Google’s image. The ad claims Google is ‘Scroogling’ its users by exploiting their private data to maximize their profits.

Get Scroogled or use Bing?

The Scroogled Campaign is being compared to the historical Mac vs. PC advertisements because they pit Google and Bing against each other. They differentiate the two by painting the perception that Google is evil because it shares individual’s data with app developers to place paid ads on their search page, which they claim to be invasive. The campaign also goes into further detail on their Scroogled website explaining that Gmail “goes through every single word of your personal messages,”  identifies themes and trends for ad targeting, and places spam ads that look like emails in your inbox.

Although Microsoft and Google have been rivals for years, Microsoft recently hired Mark Penn, a formal Clinton political campaign adviser, who has sparked this new aggressive PR campaign and has coined the term “Scroogled.”

While many critique that this campaign mirrors the strategy of a political campaign with its negative advertisements, others praise this campaign’s success in achieving widespread national and international attention.

According to an evaluation done by Ace Metrix, more than 53% of campaign viewers mention that they now look at Bing differently and that they were more willing then before to seek out more information.  Data also shows that after watching the ad, the likelihood of an individual to recommend Google to a friend dropped by about 10% and the likelihood of recommending Bing raised by about 7%.

Microsoft believes that by raising the awareness of Google’s actions with this campaign, they will generate more discussion and eventually shift the favorability gap. The Scroogled campaign is now now on its sixth wave of ads and has reportedly spent about $10 million dollars. A spokesman for Microsoft said that they will continue this campaign “as long as Google keeps Scroogling people.”