IAC Bows New Ad Campaign For Ask.com
- by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, May 3, 2006
The branding campaign, obviously aimed at building market share, features Apostolos Gerasoulis--the founder of search technology company Teoma Technologies, purchased by Ask.com in 2001.
Ask.com has long been considered a second-tier search engine, with nowhere near the traffic of market leader Google or second-place holder Yahoo or MSN. The Ask Network accounted for just 5.9 percent of online searches in March, while Google garnered 42.7 percent and Yahoo accounted for 28 percent, according to comScore Networks.
While IAC clearly hopes to grow Ask.com's market share, it's unclear whether traditional branding campaigns will convince consumers to change search engines. MSN last year debuted a large-scale ad effort to support its new search engine, but the company has actually lost market share recently. ComScore recently reported that MSN's share of the search market fell to 13.2 percent last March, from 16.5 percent one year ago.
The new Ask.com campaign comes just three months after the company, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, rebranded without the butler mascot. That effort involved a TV campaign created by TBWA/Chiat/Day.
Separately, IAC/Interactive Tuesday reported media and advertising revenue of $117.6 million--much of which came from Ask.com, acquired in March of 2005 for $1.85 billion. The company said that search query growth contributed to total ad revenue, but added that the growth in volume was somewhat offset by the company's decision to limit the number of ads on Ask.com results pages.
Profits at IAC overall were down 32 percent, although much of the drop was due to special costs. Without those costs, earnings would have totaled 31 cents a share, on revenue of $1.55 billion, surpassing the analyst expectations of 27 cents a share.
