SEL: Jeremy Swiller and Matt Cutts on Ask's TV Ad Campaign

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Search marketing in the new media era.

May 19, 2006

Jeremy Swiller and Matt Cutts on Ask's TV Ad Campaign

Jeremy Swiller (author of the Interactive Hierarchy of Needs) pinged me today about Ask's commercials, one of which he saw last night. He said I could publish his email:

Not sure if you saw commercials on Primetime NBC last night (http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/televisionads.shtml).

I actually thought they were VERY impressive...especially the Poetry search example (http://media.ask.com/creatives/ag_poetry.mov). What stuck in my mind is the last part where his son says, "Google isn't better, it's just more popular." I'm starting to drink the Kool-aid on this one.

Aside from the kid's obvious bias, the message is so ingenious and touches on a problem that I run into repeatedly with Google searches. Google is based on words and spaces, but Ask is taking a different path towards encouraging a "sub-search" based on concepts. So instead of refining my search on Google, Ask gives me the option of clicking the refinement on the page. This area is dedicated to AdWords on Google.

Despite the number of Ph.Ds. employed at Google, the Ask interface is really much smarter.

Google likes Ask's conceptual zoom too, as I think their Orion purchase indicates.

Matt Cutts didn't say anything one way or the other about concept zoom, but did note that he didn't see a spike in Alexa rankings because of them. He didn't have any commentary on the content of the commercials, but did note that "TV advertising didn’t seem to benefit MSN much last year either."

At the time of writing this post I've not watched the commercials. (also... Casie Gillette's article on site preview in SERPs effect on click throughs is coming next week.)

Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

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