Monday, August 13th, 2007 by Andy Beal

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And You Thought the US Ask.com Ads Were Strange!

We’ve covered Ask.com’s strange US television commercials, but they can’t compete with the utter weirdness of their UK cousins.

The Ask spots feature the four characters from the original campaign, plus one of the tallest men in the UK, a dog, and a rhesus monkey, the latter of whom proved to be extremely difficult to work with. “We discovered on the shoot that he hates women,” Sarah quipped,. The monkey eventually had to be shot in a separate room and combined into the picture using split-screen.

One spot, promoting Ask.com Smart Answers, featured a combined sort of human-dog-person. You’ll have to see the ad to understand. Another, using both tallest British-born man Neil Fingleton and the monkey, promotes all the features of our results page: left rail search suggestions, right-rail smart content, and more.

Ask is claiming the ads are a huge success, adding 1 million more unique users. Still, I’d like to see how many of those users stick around. If I saw a TV ad that included a dog-man discussing a product, I’d probably visit the site out of curiosity. The key is if these new users stick around.


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3 comments on “And You Thought the US Ask.com Ads Were Strange!”

  1. Justin Says:

    August 13th, 2007 at 11:21 am

    You have to ask yourself “What were they on when they created these ads?” – Seriously

  2. Mike Mothner Says:

    August 13th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

    I will admit, I too would be very tempted to visit the site out of pure intrigue and this might be exactly what they were hoping. Even though some might think such obscure advertising would be a turn-off, considering they have already seen over one million new users, it appears that it’s been a success so far.

  3. Bushido Says:

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:23 am

    Maybe the monkey was the creative genius behind these campaigns. That would explain a lot regarding the “chicks with swords” ad. :P

 
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