And a Monkey Will Lead Them: The Ask UK TV Campaign

 

What do you get when you cross a dog, a monkey, and a 7'7" Englishman? About one million new users.

At least, that's what happened for Ask UK, thanks to a series of commercials that look unlike anything else on TV.

You may recall the Information Revolution campaign from its coverage in TechCrunch and Valleywag. The campaign's initial cover was of a grassroots insurgency railing against Google's predominance in the UK. It ruffled feathers in the media when it was discovered that Ask.com was behind it, but it served to sharply raise awareness of Ask in the UK market. This third stage of the campaign includes a new crop of ads created to showcase the new features of Ask3D.

Using a similarly jarring visual conceit as the first two stages--a band of revolutionaries hacking your TV signal to free you from "sleep searching"--this stage adds new elements into the mix.

"We wanted to show people that the new Ask.com redefines the search experience," Ask UK's marketing director Sarah Bartlett told us, "Offering web, images, music, videos--more than just blue links."

Stunt Casting: Harder Than it Looks!

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.

Success.

Did the campaign have the desired effect? According to IPSOS UK, Brand image monitor, spontaneous awareness of Ask.com has increased by 106% since the start of the campaign. Nearly half of consumers who've seen the ads said they are more likely to use Ask as a result. And the campaign has been shortlisted for a pair of awards.

What's more, according to New Media Age, in the three months since Ask started the Information Revolution campaign, Ask.com UK has in fact attracted almost 1 million more unique users. Not bad for a campaign that so far has only aired in London.

--The Ask.com Team