InsideGoogle

Ask’s New Commercial Revealed

Ask, which has been pushing hard already with an ad campaign featuring strange cryptic billboards, has come out with a new TV commercial designed to promote its new Ask 3D interface. Take a look:

Definitely not crazy about it. The first shot, with the legs, sets a bad tone that seems to overemphasize the “chicks” over the “swords”, making it quite the misogynistic commercial. The ad is not going to play well with women and normal men, who will look at the ad as more exploitative than anything else, and not exploitative in a funny way (like maybe a Russ Meyer-inspired ad could have been).

The ad should have either played off the guy as a real creep (which still would have sent a bad message about Ask’s users), emphasized the guy as having a sword fetish (as opposed to focusing on the women), or had the guy get his comeuppance by being attacked by all the sword-carrying women. Ask hired a “hot” ad agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, that is more concerned with getting noticed and targeting the young male audience than actually increasing sales.

Jordan McCollum just went up 100 points in my mind, because she called this a month ago.

There are a lot of engineers at Ask who worked their asses off building Ask 3D, and a lot of other Ask employees who have labored to get the company noticed for its excellent efforts. Do they need their hard worked undermined by a bunch of dopes at CP&G? I’ve got news, it’s about more than getting your ads noticed, it’s also about getting people to like them. Don’t undermine your hardest and most dedicated workers by paying some high-priced idiots to produce stuff like this.

UPDATE: I’m not sure getting Lindsay Lohan to use your search engine in a movie is much of an endorsement, either

June 7th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Ask, Search, General | 2 comments