Bing Hopes For Touchdown With New ESPN Partnership

Football fans have probably already seen plenty of Bing advertising across various sports. And as the Super Bowl approaches, you’re going to see more: Bing and ESPN have just announced a new partnership that involves two pre-Super Bowl promotions:

• A new feature called “I Am A Champion” that begins airing this week on SportsCenter and NFL Live. It profiles various Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks and the “key life and career decisions” they’ve made.
• Sponsorship of ESPN The Magazine‘s 2011 “NEXT” event during Super Bowl weekend.

Bing has been aggressively advertising to football fans during the current season with things like the Bing National Tailgating Championship, visibility during Monday Night Football and SportsCenter broadcasts, advertising on Sports Illustrated‘s website, and now this latest push.

Has it worked? A spokesperson says Bing has seen a 17% jump in traffic among the 50+ million football fans tracked by comScore (compared to the three months before the NFL season began). And, via testing at its NFL tailgating events, Bing’s awareness is up 29% and favorability has increased 24%.

Bing has also pushed several football-related features into its search experience. We recently wrote about the addition of FanSnap ticket inventory to Bing’s search results, and Bing shared about a half-dozen others in a blog post late Friday afternoon.