“Why is their marketing so random?” asks Harry McCracken.
“Why is their marketing so creepy?” asks SAI’s Dan Frommer.
“Why is the music so sad? Why is she obese? More important: why is she BRITISH?” asks VideoGum.
Harry did accurately observe that the base message being conveyed in the most recent Ask.com commercial is more or less the same as what they started with back in 1996 with AskJeeves, the original moniker for the site.
While I think that the Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft ads could be arguably groundbreaking, in that they were more like sponsored entertainment content rather than traditional advertisement, I have a hard time defending these Ask.com ads. The ads seem to have most pundits and Twitter reactionaries asking questions rather than wanting to try out the service.
Here are the two most recent ads:
On the other hand, those who live “outside the bubble,” so to speak, all seem to have the uniform reaction that the ads are just downright hilarious.