Microsoft has a little March Madness promotion going for its Bing search engine called Bing Predicts. The purpose, of course, is to drum up buzz for Bing by getting "in on the conversation" and leveraging a trending topic and... never mind, all that #brandspeak is putting us to sleep, too.
The only catch: A strange Photoshop fail has resulted in hoops fans calling out Bing, generating just the opposite kind of buzz.
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Ahead of Sunday's Elite 8 matchup between Duke and Gonzaga, Microsoft boasted that Bing searches indicated Duke had a 70% chance of winning. But a Wisconsin fan named Kristen Yarows, who saw the ad, noticed something funny: Bing had Photoshopped her -- along with other Badgers supporters -- to make them look like Duke fans.
I guess Bing thinks it's cool to try to photoshop me into a Duke fan. Too bad I'm a Badger for life. #FinalFour #OnWisconsin PS am I an Internet celebrity? A photo posted by Kristen Yarows (@k10yarows) on Mar 29, 2015 at 4:20pm PDT
Wait. What? Why? Weird. After all, there are already about 70 billion photos of actual Duke fans online that Bing could have chosen from.
"It just seems like a lot more work than they needed to do," Yarows told Mashable.
Yarows said she saw Bing's original promoted tweet, including her Photoshopped face, in her Twitter timeline after friends tipped her off about the surprise appearance. Here's the ad, which Bing tweeted out to more than 650,000 followers on Sunday:
#Gonzaga has a big a challenge ahead. Score 78+ PTS & hold #Duke http://t.co/6BTZey9fN7 pic.twitter.com/VPfuucl0GX— Bing (@bing) March 29, 2015
That post drew this reply, apparently from another one of the Wisconsin fans who Bing magically turned into a Duke supporter:
@bing wait what? I'm not a duke fan .... pic.twitter.com/XKAEsj5jEB— AJB (@alennaisawesome) March 29, 2015
Duke plays Michigan State in the Final Four on Saturday, followed by Wisconsin against Kentucky in the other semifinal matchup. Should the Blue Devils and Badgers advance, Monday's March Madness final will double as a strange case of Bing-ception.