Last night I was on some website or another when Ask.com’s ridiculous “dancing morons” commercial appeared in a banner ad on the sidebar of the site. I’ve seen this commercial elsewhere, I think it’s dumb, and so I tweeted about it:

Dear @AskDotCom – your marketing campaign is stupid. Nobody uses you anymore. Just stop, okay? You’re embarrassing yourself.

Because the tweet was written in a “Dear x” format it got picked up and retweeted by @DearRobot who is, I assume, a robot. I’ve no idea whether @DearRobot helped this get noticed by whoever runs Ask.com’s Twitter presence because I woke up this morning to find this response:

@DearRobot @BenPaddon – Can you offer any suggestions on we can improve?

My reply:

@AskDotCom Not in 140 characters unfortunately.If you have an email address I’d gladly write you a thing.

And so I was furnished with an email address from someone who’s name I wasn’t entirely sure of, and I wrote the following:

Hi there. Not sure if your name is Mary Ann, or Mary-Ann, or Maryann, so I’ll go with Mary for now. I think that’s probably the safest bet.

I’ve thought about Ask.com a lot over the years. Not excessively, of course – I have one of those “life” things that stop me devoting too much time to trivial things like search engines, or which shape of acorn squirrels find the most aesthetically pleasing, or why whenever super villains team up they invariably end up giving themselves a long team name which abbreviates to something like HARM, or DEATH, or SCUM. I mean, they’re just calling attention to themselves. You’d think they’d go with something more pleasing like KITTEN, or FLOWER, or TREACLE. If I found out that there was an organization called SPECTRE I’d probably want to know a bit more about what they’re getting up to. That’s an inherently untrustworthy name, if you ask me. You can get away with a lot more evil if you dress it up a little.

But anyway.

I mentioned on Twitter that Ask.com’s marketing campaign, the one with people dancing around pointing at themselves, is ridiculous. Don’t worry, you’re not the only ones doing an ad campaign that looks this foolish – I’m fairly certain I saw a similar commercial on Hulu for a completely different company. All that means, though, is that both Ask.com and another company had this idea thrown at them by a marketing team and then said, “Yeah, sure, why not?”

There’s the first problem – two companies are doing the same thing. Already any success your”dancing around like a pointing idiot” campaign may experience is marginalized by those other buggers. The commercial starts up and you don’t know which one it is, and so you don’t care. You go off and do other things – make a sandwich, feed the cat, and wait for Heroes to come back on.

The second problem is that it doesn’t actually tell you what Ask.com actually does. Now I’m sure the answer to that is “Well, people can go to Ask.com and find out for themselves,” but if all you’re doing is showing a bunch of people dancing and then follow that by throwing a URL up on the screen, people aren’t going to be inclined to find out more. For all they know it’s a commercial for dancing lessons.

Put simply, it’s a silly commercial. It’s painful to watch. I feel sorry for the people who appeared in it (although not too sorry because I know how well commercials pay and I am, frankly, a little jealous that they got paid to dance around for thirty seconds). All that commercial does is bring to mind how great Ask.com used to be. “O, how the mighty have fallen,” I think.

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that funny commercials tend to stick in people’s minds more. When I say “funny” I don’t mean “marketing funny” – that is, ideas that marketing people think will be funny but when actually committed to film and shown on network television are actually kind of rubbish – I mean genuinely funny. Genuinely funny commercials written by people with a genuine sense of humour and featuring actors who are capable of genuinely pulling off the joke. have a look at this commercial for John Smiths, a British bitter. Now, this commercial ran in the mid-90s. I was probably ten years old when I saw this commercial. I didn’t drink then and I still don’t drink now, but that commercial is forever lodged in my mind. 14 years later I still remember the joke, and I still remember the name of the bitter being sold.

I doubt that anyone will remember Ask.com’s dancy pointy commercial in even a year’s time. And, dancing aside, there’s nothing about Ask.com’s branding that really stands out… which leads me onto my next point.

There are some people who feel that Ask.com lost its way when it ditched P. G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” character as its mascot. I’m not one of those people. I can, to a point, see why Ask.com would let the character go. When the only reason people are going onto the website is to ask in the question “Are you gay?” you have to wonder if the character has retained its value. Plus the licensing probably wasn’t cheap either, unless it was, in which case ignore this last sentence.

Dropping Jeeves was by no means a bad decision, but it did mean that Ask.com has lost a human face. Granted, it’s a cartoon human face, but it’s a face all the same. Jeeves is back in the UK, and if American users specifically go to AskJeeves.com they’ll be greeted once again by the fat-faced butler, but the current CG rendering of the character lacks the charm of the original stylized drawing from the late 90s/early 2000s. It doesn’t have any life, or soul, or what have you. Now the company, and by extension the website, just feels like another Big Company. Indeed, there was a time when asking Jeeves “are you gay?” was met with the response “I prefer the term ‘jovial’” but that doesn’t happen anymore. There’s no human element to Ask.com. There’s nothing friendly about the site.

Google has somehow managed to retain that feeling of “We’re just like you!” because… well, I suppose because they’re big and bright and colourful and they interact with their users and have given us nice things like GMail and Google Wave and they have, above all else, kept things simple. And their marketing! Their Google Chrome commercials are inspired. Google’s philosophy seems to be “Let’s make things that could be useful to people, and the money will probably come afterwards.”

What can we gleam from this? Well, insofar as the internet is concerned, going in with an attitude of “How can we make money?” probably won’t work. The best thing to do is to go in with an attitude of “What do people need?” The answer to that question probably isn’t “a search engine”, because there’s tons of the buggers about. There’s a reason Microsoft has had so many failed search engine attempts – there’s no demand for one. There’s no gap in the market.

The trick, then, becomes finding something that internet users don’t even know they want yet. And I’m afraid I can’t help you with that, because if I knew what that was I would be a millionaire by now.

I hope this has been of some help to you, although it probably hasn’t. Nevertheless it was fun to write.

Regards,
~Ben

So that’s it. I’m no consultant – and I think it probably shows – but when someone asks me how they can improve I’ll bloody-well tell ‘em.