SEO’Brien | interactive marketing

I had a very similar experience a few weeks ago in New York. On the cab ride in from Newark airport, I spied a billboard stating that “the algorithm is from Jersey”. I noticed a few more of these throughout the week, deduced their origin. Now that I know who put them there, they still make no sense. Why not promote your brand by backing up all those millions spent on TV campaigns? I think that Ask has gotten a bit ahead of themselves with this one.

Thank you for the clarification - I drove by “The Algorithm Killed jeeves” board in SF this week and it’s definitely left an impression, though you’re right, I wasnt sure at all what engine was being advertised - and could only imagine what people out of our industry must be thinking.

I think ask was trying to be viral here but not too well… trying to reach online users and marketers with outdoor advertising and no mention of a URL? hm.

I’m not advertising Ask.com here. But if you actually go to the site you can then join the ‘information revolution’ or whatever. Seems slightly novel, but more showy than anything; I might try it out later.

Anyway, kinda ironic that you used google to research this instead of going to ask.com to see what it was all about.

Jeeves had a reputation of being for newbies not just because of the way it accepted requests, but also because its hand-edited index was shallow. I think this campaign is making people aware that Ask claims to have a decent crawler now. Only those who care about that kind of thing will understand the ads, but that doesn’t matter.

Ask have recently had an equally nonsensical ad campaign in the UK, supposedly encouraging “grass roots” rejection of the most popular search engine (i.e. Google).

Posters and adverts all pointed to http://www.information-revolution.org/

It didn’t take long to WHOIS the site, and read that it belonged to a PR company with Ask among their clients.

Oh, so thats what all that strange boards were all about.

The same thing happened to me when I saw those signs. I’d say there’s a problem with your marketing campaign when “Google” is the first thing people think of when seeing your ads.

Now that looks like a viable marketing campaign. Thanks for the posts about the Information Revolution.

Their 10 reasons search has evolved is insightful, valuable, and a clean experience. Nice job Ask!

Don’t you assume that they’re advertising the fact that their algorithm wasn’t altered to appease the chinese government… I think the fact that the algorithm is banned in China IS something to brag about…

Good point JS but coming late to the game in a country with a billion customers certainly won’t help.

Looks like good advertising to me, it perked your interest to write about it, got on digg and now has all these people talking about it and visiting ask.com, to me mission successfull.

Paul - great article. Ask totally wasted their money with this campaign. Sure, they are creating buzz amongst people like you and I who are in the industry; but what about the general consumer? If they are trying to increase their market share, this campaign is not helping at all. They must have forgot who their target audience really is.

- Michael

live tv, now that I’ve hit digg, I’m moving to agree with you. Admittedly, I am on the fence and my last comment about good/bad PR is speculative more than a concrete position one way or the other. Certainly, they’ve created buzz, links, and interest.

My sense is that the ad is very obscure. Garfield was, I believe, the pioneer of citation reference modeling and his first client was Bell Labs in New Jersey. Google’s algorithm is based upon citation reference modeling. So my interpretation of the ads is that the algorithm killed off Jeeves and the algorithm started in NJ. I suspect that Google which has used math tests to identify bright people may be attempting to reinforce its brand, but it does not seem terribly successful as a hiring device.

I’d say in this case all PR is good PR. People are asking questions, and although they aren’t all positive, it still leaves people with Ask in their minds. Maybe it’s something subconscious they are aiming for?

We were on our way to the SEO show in NYC a couple of weeks ago and saw the billboard going into the Linclon tunnel. So we ended up going to Ask.com’s booth to ask them about it.

Here is what I posted about it on my site.

“Strange moment of the day:

On the way into the Lincoln Tunnel, we saw a billboard that simply said
“The Algorithm killed Jeeves”

So after a discussion and ruling out that they were talking about Al, we decided to go to the Ask.com booth to ask them what it was about. Ask.com used to be AskJeeves.com. After a discussion with some of the girls at the booth who didn’t have a clue, they produced a guy who proceeded to ramble on about a bunch of nonsense about marketing in the UK. Bottom line: He didn’t have a clue and I don’t think that Ask.com’s marketing people do either.

So we spend over 5 minutes at the Ask.com booth and not one of them told us anything about Ask.com or what they are up to. I guess we confused them.”
If you would like to read the whole post go to
http://www.merlist.com/?p=264

Thanks for more info on this subject. Sometimes marketers go to far off the path.

KF

[...] leaves folks scratching their heads and these new messages are even more confusing than the originalread more | digg [...]

I’ve just figured it all out. After ten minutes of Googling (sorry Ask… hehe) ‘the algorythm’ trying to find someone who can explain this campaign to me, I finally see the point. This campaign is deliberately non-sensical and cryptic so that the blogging community write articles like yours, generating brand buzz (negative or positive is irrelevant), thus getting ask.com in to our heads, and hopefully a few curious users going to try it…. Sneaky fuckers. Clever though…

just realised I can’t spell algorithm… not so insightful now are we, smart arse? hehe….

[...] really threw me for a guilt trip. I stand by my criticism of their ad campaign (as I think do most) and a poor man’s review of their traffic suggests it hasn’t [...]

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[...] is an important question these days. My own article “The Algorithm Apparently Killed Jeeves” reached the homepage of digg bringing down my servers with thousands of hits a minute. While [...]

[...] why does this matter to you? It is not all about the algorithm and SEO is about more than keywords. Pay attention to content and keep your eye on the real players [...]

Apparently Ask just wants to “make our heads explode.”

http://blog.ask.com/2007/05/the_algorithm_i.html