April 21, 2009 by Jay Smith
Remember the early days of the search engine and the jovial butler who used to fetch answers (sometimes anyway) for all your search queries? Well, he’s back. Three years after unceremoniously dumping him in favour of cooler, simpler branding, Ask.com have admitted that the new direction wasn’t working and reintroduced the portly servant, albeit with a knatty 3D makeover.
But will it work? Well, returning to a policy that has already been perceived not to work doesn’t exactly make your brand look strong. On the other hand, Ask has been losing market share steadily for years now, perhaps it makes sense to return to a policy that saw them performing better.
Also, the portly butler is simply a better branding-wise than the previous campaign, which explicitly tried to mark them out as ‘not Google.’ When you base your whole advertising campaign around a competitor, you clearly mark yourself out as second banana which, even if you are, as is the case with Ask, is a fact you don’t exactly want to broadcast.
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