Plaxo’s been a company I’ve been watching for a while now. In fact, ever since it’s “evil” days. Unfortunately for them, that was my first and lasting impression of them. Subsequent apologies notwithstanding. So while I thought the concept was interesting and probably useful, it wasn’t useful enough to overcome my fear that I’d get spammed or that my privacy would be breached in some way. Regardless of whatever legalese was theoretically protecting my rights. But now with version 3.0, the functionality has seemed to have reached the point where the usefulness has overcome my rational (or irrational) fears. It’s taken more than a year and I’m still a bit leery, but sort of like making the trade off between a risky investment and a high return, I’m willing to take the plunge.Lesson learned? Nothing groundbreaking, but if I was doing a startup, I’d make sure that first impression was fan-fricking-tastic.
I’m sure there were a few business and communications goals when Ask.com launched their new “algorithm” ad campaign in March/April (I think).
- Increase share of searches (ideally stealing from Google, since the whole algorithm campaign seems tailor made for targeting Google)
- Increase first time traffic
- Impact ad revenue
- Improve Ask.com brand awareness
- Improve/change Ask.com brand perception
And for the past couple months, there’s been a pretty healthy amount of buzz around the campaign. But mostly because the campaign has sucked.The accepted belief is that any publicity is good publicity. That if people are talking about your ad, you’re getting the word out one way or the other, so it’s all good. To some degree this is true. But it really depends on the circumstance. For a flash in the pan, yeah anything’s good. For a company that’s planning to stick around for the long haul… well, if you had a choice, you’d much prefer the publicity for the right reasons.All the mystery around the Ask.com is driving traffic. According to Alexa, traffic’s up 24% in the past 3 months. Google traffic’s down 7%.So traffic is up. Revenue’s probably up. Share of searches has probably increased. People are talking. Empirically, you’d guess that Ask.com’s brand awareness is up. Perception is probably not changed, or probably has worsened, but that’s always spinnable. So from an ad agency perspective all this is great news. Another win for CP+B.Except this campaign has no legs. It’s built no affinity with users. And the only reason anyone’s talking about the ad campaign is because everyone’s confused and pissed off at the inanity of it.For the technically in-the-know, no one’s buying that Ask’s algorithm is better than Google’s. And for the layman, no one knows what the funk, an algorithm even is. So ultimately, their campaign’s built on a pretty baseless reason to believe.So statistically, the Ask campaign’s been a huge success to date, for all the wrong reasons. An unbelievable reason to believe. A nebulous ad campaign. Word of mouth that’s spread for the same reason Snakes on a Plane word of mouth spread, i.e., the suckiness.Six months later, everyone stops talking about how retarded the ad campaign is, the buzz dies down, and Ask’s traffic drops to about pre-campaign levels. Except now they’re tens of millions of dollars out with no measurable impact on their brand perception. But whatever. They had their 15 minutes of fame.To be frank, I really haven’t been impressed by anything CP+B’s done, from a strategic standpoint, since Mini (although I’m not claiming to have seen everything). And I felt Mini was really just a ripoff of the 70’s Volkswagen campaign. Ironically, I did enjoy CP+B’s VW campaign from an entertainment perspective. But it seems like everything I see from them is based on some completely jacked up concept. It’s great from a buzz perspective, but it’s easy to throw wack ideas out there just to get people talking.
