Comments on: Ask Helps You Find Obscure Non-Celebrities

By: Wasteland Betty

Wasteland Betty — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:55:10 +0000

Enough about Kato. . .
Who was that woman in the ad?

By: Meredith

Meredith — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 01:34:55 +0000

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?

By: WTF

WTF — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:05:01 +0000

Indeed, Johnnie Cochran is no longer with us. Neither will Ask’s ad agency contract after too long.

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 20:49:32 +0000

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?

By: Loren

Loren — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:02:30 +0000

“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.

By: Shambhu

Shambhu — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:32:40 +0000

@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).

By: Ido

Ido — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:32:00 +0000

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.

By: Concrete Stain

Concrete Stain — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:56:08 +0000

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

By: u

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:25:20 +0000

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

By: Kathryn

Kathryn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:09:57 +0000

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.

By: Petitpiet

Petitpiet — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 12:12:23 +0000

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!

By: Sambay Reviews

Sambay Reviews — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 05:39:58 +0000

Parody? I’d say that’s pretty much what Surface really is!

By: Saïd Amin

Saïd Amin — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 04:34:52 +0000

amazing that so much “air time” is given to ask.com ads. kudos to them for getting so much exposure on TechCrunch.

life,
-s

By: Anne H

Anne H — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 03:50:59 +0000

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.

By: theman

theman — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 02:57:13 +0000

@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!

By: Robert Seidman

Robert Seidman — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 02:31:49 +0000

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.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 02:25:41 +0000

What a lame and unimpressive ad. Well, at least they tried! Still, I’m not impressed by Ask.

By: heri

heri — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 02:19:20 +0000

thanks for the joke of the day

By: WTF

WTF — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 01:48:36 +0000

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!

By: Andrew Fife

Andrew Fife — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 01:42:43 +0000

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.

By: Duncan Riley

Duncan Riley — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 01:18:49 +0000

jackmayhofferr
Strangely enough I think Ask has a lot going for it, their advertising isn’t one of those things.

By: jackmayhofferr

jackmayhofferr — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 01:02:51 +0000

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 $$

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:48:08 +0000

Yeah, do people really not remember Kato Kaelin? I wouldn’t say he’s that obscure.

By: sean percival

sean percival — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:30:31 +0000

Kato isnt so obscure in the states, sadly he is almost a household name.

By: James

James — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:28:56 +0000

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.