Ask’s latest musical advertisement is out, and apparently the search engine under-dog can help you find Kato Kaelin, an obscure non-celebrity that according to Wikipedia is known for a minor role in the OJ Simpson trial.
Advertisement as below. I was always under the presumption that one of the key points of advertising was finding a connection with your audience. When people talk about Ask being a niche player it would appear that they weren’t kidding; Kato Kaelin is so obscure the name will likely be lost on a good portion of the viewing audience.
(via Inside Google)
The ad is annoying and the reappearance of Kato is really disappointing. I guess the Ask algorithm is pretty good…turning over rocks to find KK.
Well, I guess Gilbert Godfried wasn’t available… or just too far out of their price range.
I saw this yesterday, and all I could say was, what…..the…..frack. What kind of psycho marketing executive would pay some ungodly sum to an advertising firm for this kind of crap. IMHO, I think Ask.com would be better off having Johnnie Cochran come-up with their ad campaign (sticking to the whole OJ theme). And yes, I do know he’s dead. I still think Ask would be better off.
one thing i have to say though in ask’s defense is that search is all about mindshare. While their ad campaign may be a little strange and nice, it has done a GREAT job of getting the media and people to talk about Ask, which they weren’t doing before, and certainly don’t do about either Yahoo or MSN search. I would say overall for Ask and their marketing team: mission accomplished.
I guess Dillar’s money couldn’t buy them a real actor!
You know ask has been one of the most silently owned and operated since it changed hands last and started outsourcing google ads. I think the Cia doesn’t even know who owns ask.com really owns that is. Maybe HRI do but seriously speaking the music and jingles we all know how powerfull jingles coupled with branding can be.
I think it works
Duncan–
Check out the video sponsorship Ask.com did with Ask a Ninja.
http://www.askaninja.com/
The campaign has been a huge success for FM, the Ninja, and Ask.
Kato isnt so obscure in the states, sadly he is almost a household name.
Yeah, do people really not remember Kato Kaelin? I wouldn’t say he’s that obscure.
Ducan,
What’s your beef with Ask? TechCrunch is supposed to be about what is happenening in SV, yet you seem to take ever opportunity you can to bash Ask’s advertising campaigns (which you obviously don’t understand).
A good search engine should be able to find obscure things — LIKE KATO — DUH!!!
Nuff Said … how about some objective journalism, not your opion on something you really don’t get.
Oh Yeah — Ask is advertising on TC. So obviously you like their $$
jackmayhofferr
Strangely enough I think Ask has a lot going for it, their advertising isn’t one of those things.
I definitely disagree. Assuming that they are targeting North America, where Kato is pretty hard to forget, I think its an entertaining and memorable ad. However, Microsoft’s experience with TV advertising for MSN was a big failure, so it may be that TV isn’t a good medium to drive traffic to search engines.
Lot of paranoid people from Ask.com leaving comments, I see. I would too, given how incredibly crappy that ad campaign is.
One thing: seeing and ad and talking about it doesn’t lead to monetization, especially when you think the message sucks. It reflects on the judgment of the company. It’s like Kmart putting out a really dumb-arse ad that is totally off the mark, people talking about how dumb-arse the ad is and then saying, “Wow, people are talking about our dumb arse ad, since we’re water cooler talk now, I bet all those people are going to run out and shop at Kmart!!” Not going to happen. It’s going to take a lot more for most people to trust a search from http://www.ask.com vs. http://www.google.com.
I think that this ranks up there with Gap’s “The Boyfriend Trousers” ad. Yikes. At least Gap was smart enough to kill it.
Nevertheless — good luck!
thanks for the joke of the day
What a lame and unimpressive ad. Well, at least they tried! Still, I’m not impressed by Ask.
hey hey no Gilbert Gottfried bashing, he was GREAT as the AFLAC duck!
I have no beef with Ask, I just wonder why anyone would use it for search over Google. But I wonder why anyone would use *anything* for search other than Google other than resistance to changing habits. Google has 2/3rds of the market already and I think GOOG is going to move towards the 80/20 rule before any kind of regression to the mean happens.
I think Kato was the perfect non-celeb for Ask to pick, they’re both very insgnificant so it’s a great match…and searching should be about great matches.
@16 haha, speaking about throwing in some out of context buzzwords!
“GOOG is going to move towards the 80/20 rule before any kind of regression to the mean happens”
you have to be kidding me!
OK, I’m showing my age here. No regrets
When I first saw the reference to “Kato” on TechMeme, I thought about Bruce Lee from the Green Hornet. I guess if I had followed the OJ trial, I would’ve made the other association.
While I don’t think the ad is effective, it’s being talked about enough so new users may give Ask a try. As for Bruce Lee “Kato”, he’s on Page 2 of the SERPs. Damn algos.
amazing that so much “air time” is given to ask.com ads. kudos to them for getting so much exposure on TechCrunch.
life,
-s
Parody? I’d say that’s pretty much what Surface really is!
How can we be impressed by ask? If i could at least be impressed by the ads, would be a nice first step. Will take me a lot to get away from google god!
It seems to me that it’s trivially easy to find even an “obscure non-celebrity” like Kato Kaelin on any search engine. If you’re going to tout your product as better than Google, it seems counterproductive to pick a test subject that also turns up thousands of equally relevant results with your competitor.
The real test is this: can Ask find a French-speaking scholar who specializes in the history of the Mexican revolution? revolution mexique universite pulls up 3-4 good candidates in the first 10 results on Google (and the first 6 out of those 10 are the best and closest). The top of Ask’s results are devoted to sponsored adds for a flea-control product called “Revolution,” available from Canada, and in the first 17 results there’s only one that’s even close to “what I was looking for,” somewhere down in the middle.
Visually it’s great. Even conceptually it’s great. This is targeted towards women, so a woman sings a hymn to Ask’s search engine while there’s a lovely musical number around her, even involving her.. All this shot with great production values that won’t go unnoticed by the target audience.
There’s actually a lot of hidden warmth in the whole setup. The clip certainly has a warm, jubilant tone – yet another thing that the average woman will appreciate and something most of the tonedeaf TechCrunch readers won’t/can’t
This ad does suck!
– KATO – hasnt been popular since the trial / so he is obscure.
– when I saw the commercial – It took me 3 minutes to figure who he was..
-RB
I think that what Ask are doing is really interesting in terms of evaluating how much their campaign works.
Let’s take this ad as an example. How many people are actually searching for Kato Kaelin in an average week? probably not many, he is too obscure and irrelevant for the general public. now Ask comes up with this ad and suddenly there is a spike in searches for “Kato Kaelin” in the Ask website -> now Ask knows for sure that their ad affected this many thousands of people, and they can track those people with cookies/IPs too see how many of them come back because they are satisfied with the site.
The AskANinga.com campaign does the same thing. The last episode asked the viewers to search the non-term “Minjas”. Now Ask can quantify how effective their campaign is.
Furthermore, as some of the people above me said, the fact that people are talking about the ads just says how effective they are.
@22 Kathryn: To be fair, since Google’s original algorithm was inspired by the Soc. Cit. index, it is naturally still the best at finding scholarly references. Ask would have to duplicate Google to give the same results, and they’re clearly not going for the educated market.
As for the ad, though gross, it is well made, and I’m glad for the other performers getting work. At this point in our culture, they could probably make and market a movie about Mr. Kaelin (and, unfortunately, he does resemble a young Kevin Bacon).
“Kato Kaelin is so obscure the name will likely be lost on a good portion of the viewing audience.”
Not if you’re between the ages of 25 to 39 and an American
Weird person to be searching for, but an icon of Ask.com’s target market’s weird pre-Internet adoption pop culture.
This ad has absolutely nothing to do with Kato. If anything, people might even say who the freak is, and go look at Ask.com. Watch it again. It’s about getting good search results. (HINT: She only says got what she was looking for about 50 times).
Is Johnny Cochran really dead?
Indeed, Johnnie Cochran is no longer with us. Neither will Ask’s ad agency contract after too long.
I saw this ad spot an hour or two ago and I was shocked. Kato Kaelin? Who cares about Kato Kaelin enough to search for him? And just how ashamed should I feel that I knew instantly who that guy was, even though he looks like a washed-up 80s hair band member?
Enough about Kato. . .
Who was that woman in the ad?