• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 14, 2005

As companies continue to compete for the growing online ad dollars spent on search marketing, search engine Ask Jeeves will this week join rival MSN on the air in a consumer branding campaign.

The effort marks Ask Jeeves' return to television advertising after a four-year absence. "We really see this as a first step in a marketing program," said Greg Ott, vice president of marketing. The campaign's goal, he said, is "helping people re-engage with the Ask Jeeves brand."

Currently, Ask Jeeves is the sixth most popular search engine, behind Google, Yahoo!, MSN, America Online, and meta-search portal Information.com, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Competitor MSN launched a branding campaign to tout its new search engine two weeks ago; at the time, a company executive boasted that the effort would be the biggest since the introduction of the MSN Butterfly about five years ago.

The Ask Jeeves ads cap 18 months of upgrades to the search engine, said Ott. Most recently, in September, Ask Jeeves beefed up its site with new personalization capabilities that allow users to save their queries, and last week, the company announced the acquisition of blog search engine Bloglines.

The campaign, a series of six 15-second spots designed by TBWAChiatDay, San Francisco, will run on network television shows including "American Idol," "Arrested Development," and "The O.C."--which, coincidentally, recently aired an episode in which a character mentioned competing search engine A9.