New Microsoft Scroogled ad has a go at Google Play store

Wow, Microsoft’s Scroogled advertising campaign is starting to take on the tone of a heavyweight US political campaign.

The Redmond giant’s latest ad in the series has a go at the freshly revamped Google Play store, attacking its policy of revealing the names, email addresses and neighborhoods of people who’ve bought apps on the store.

The video shows a man and a woman sitting on the steps outside a terraced home, with the woman explaining that Google sends your personal details to an app maker once you’ve downloaded, before a whole load of creepy-looking app developers start surrounding the man. A Google Street View car then drives by and snaps a picture of them.

The message of the ad: if you can’t trust Google’s app store, why should you trust it with search, so try Bing instead.

That’s a little more out of kilter than the direct comparison attacks that Microsoft has previously used in the campaign. In February for instance, it attacked Gmail urging people to switch over to Outlook instead.

The first part of the campaign involved Google shopping, and detailed how all the ‘results’ are actually paid ads, and suggested you use Bing instead.

It’s unclear why it didn’t use the ad to promote its own app store (although it does do so on the main Scroogled page). Doing so in a commercial may have seemed a little desperate in the face of poor sales of Microsoft smartphones and tablets. As it is, the ads are starting to look a little like Microsoft is would rather use negative advertising to win over new customers than allow the products to speak for themselves.