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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.
