Never fear; Ask is launching more TV ads. Then again, when you look at the agency they’ve hired to do them, maybe we should all be afraid (be very afraid). These are the same people who brought the world the plastic-headed King from Burger King and brought Orville Redenbacher most of the way back from the dead.

It was bound to happen. Television is still the most popular medium. More people are watching it than browsing the Web every day. And Ask is looking blood. Google blood.

The problem is they’ve got a long way to go to catch Google. But it’s not so far to catch Microsoft and the way you win a horse race is to take each forerunner one at a time. It seems that is Ask’s underlying strategy.

Trying to reinvent itself, the fourth largest Internet search engine is using an integrative approach to marketing. Trying to create buzz offline to drive people online to use its search technology. This is becoming more and more mainstream as other virtual companies also make the move to integrated marketing approaches. In fact, both Google and Yahoo have started running television ads, and Google is using other offline approaches as well. Ask is buying up billboard space too.

This brings up an interesting question for the rest of us. Will such big media campaigns force the rest of us to follow suit and market ourselves offline as well as online. It may be a necessity for survival in a few years. The talk for the last five years or so has been the necessity for offline companies to market themselves online. Now, online companies are going offline to reach new markets. In the future, will we all be both online and offline? I’m betting we will be.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Branding and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.