Why I Think the Internet Bubble is Back, Part I

The other day I had lunch at Dixie Belle's Bar-B-Q. (Which was just excellent -- it's on 64 in Apex, and it has amazing fried okra and nicely seasoned collards. Anyway.)

The music is WQDR, which is country. I was kinda tuning it out until the commercials came on and I heard something like, "Hi, I'm Adam, Junior Marketing Executive for Ask Jeeves."

I dropped my hushpuppy and said to my husband, "Ask Jeeves is doing radio commercials."

Adam continued with a brief lament that nobody appreciated how Ask Jeeves was the best search engine and offered thus-and-such feature, so to get the point across he was going to CARVE IT INTO HIS CHEST.

Sounds of agony followed while my husband and I stared, appalled, at the ceiling. Finally Adam announced weakly that that should do the trick.

He's apparently a fast healer because half-a-second later Adam was back, again bemoaning the fact that no one recognized Ask Jeeves as the best search engine so he was going to try to get the point across in a different language. There followed a line of pig latin followed by one word of Spanish.

Then Garth Brooks came on, which made it even more surreal.

I know to do radio commercials you have to do something "catchy". But while simulating self-mutilation for your brand may be "catchy", it's catchy in the way that a badly-singing sock puppet is catchy or a chimpanzee imitating Iron Eyes Cody is catchy. (Which is why this entry is titled what it is.) That is, it doesn't say much about your company or why people should try your services. And on a country music station it's just kinda gross.

If I had to do radio commercials for Ask Jeeves here's what I'd do: I'd divide my commercials into several different genres for different types of radio stations -- rock, country, R&B, alt, etc. Then I'd go to the search engine people and find out what the most popular searches are for each of those genres. Then I'd build commercials around the artists that are being searched for most often, discussing how to use AJ features to learn more about the music -- using Ask Jeeves MyJeeves feature to become the best Trace Adkins fan ever, using Bloglines to read all the Coldplay fan blogs, etc.

I know these kinds of commercials aren't hip and edgy -- but the Internet did hip and edgy from approximately 1998 to 2001, and it was a mess. The Internet isn't a "new" thing like it was then, it's an accepted part of our culture. It seems to me that for an Internet company, the emphasis in commercials should be about teaching people what it can do for them and what features it offers.

Of course, they are the big Internet executives and as always I'm the woman living under her desk eating fried okra. But Ask Jeeves has spent enough time and money and energy in the last couple of years turning itself around, adding great features, and in general becoming a contender. It's worthy of better commercials than this.

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