You might want to check out this campaign by Ask on Ask a Ninja.

http://askaninja.com/ninjasayings

It is getting some great reviews.

Ad Rants
http://www.adrants.com/2007/05/ask-ask-a-ninja-get-together-for-algo.php

Puppet Vision
http://puppetvision.blogspot.com/2007/05/innovative-podcasting-sponsorship.html

Let me know what you think.
James

Viral is the way to go for them. I just saw their tv commercial on SciFi at 11:30pm tonight. And all I could think was, “Duh” and “Whaaa” and I guarantee you that at least 65% of the audience of SciFi for some boxing show could care less about a search engine.

I would love to meet with the ad campaign creators here in NYC and discuss the background of the campaign.

When something becomes a household word, that offers it the ability (not saying Google is doing this) to lay around and still reap the rewards. It's how things work.

And remember, while techies might switch because Ask is "better", the average Internet user doesn't know nor care which is better. They go to Google because it's the popular one, the one that everyone uses.

And believe me, I completely believe in the little guy. Everyone was a little guy at one time. The thing is, the Google mountain just keeps getting bigger.

And no worries about the mormon comment, for some reason a lot of people think I am a mormon.

Would people switch to Ask if Ask was better? OBVIOUSLY. They switched from Yahoo/et al to use Google, no reason they wouldn’t switch again.

Don’t buy into that household name bullshit. Google wasn’t always a household name.

Going by your mentality, nothing will ever change – the big guys will be big guys, the small guys have no chance. History has proven time and time again that the big guys do fall, the innovator succeeds, and you’re a moron.

This is marketing war, so it’s not human lives we’re talking about. It’s dollars.

Does Ask.com have deeper pockets than Google? Say, for example, three times Google’s liquid cash? Looks like the market cap of IACI (Ask’s parent) is about 9 billion. Google is at almost 149 billion. Hmm. Ask is in for a rough time.

But I like underdogs. To me, Ask.com has two options: to become Apple to Google’s Microsoft — elegant, better engineered, smaller, and cool — or they can invent a new market category and fill it. From that vantage point (and a base of profitability), they’ll be in better shape to begin the job of repositioning the GoogleBeast.

In either case, their current marketing program is fated to be a noble failure.

To me, the breach in Google’s rather impressive earthworks is obvious. It’s equally clear that Ask.com doesn’t see it, or they would be behaving differently.

Ask needs to go more for the guerilla marketing angle if it wants to grab market share, not huge mainstream campaigns that reach a lot of people who couldn’t care less about search engines.

The real question for Ask (or Yahoo! & Microsoft) is how can they dramatically differentiate themselves in the marketplace? To borrow a term from Seth Godin, what is their Purple Cow? How are they thinking differently than Google?

Google used unconventional techniques (PageRank link analysis) to usurp the prior keyword frequency based search engines (AltaVista, Infoseek, Excite, Inktomi, etc). The key to beating Google is to find the next technology that will be the defining generational leap… That is much easier said than done!