As it attempts to resurrect the success of its early years, Ask is running a billboard advertising campaign in the US, with ‘mysterious’ slogans such as:

THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS, THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES & (in a clear dig at Google) THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA.

I’m sure that the marketing team at Ask thought that they had hit on a really great marketing idea that was bound to go viral and inflame people’s innate curiosity. Which they may well have done. The only problem is that anyone intrigued enough by these billboards to look for more information on them by searching, will not find much information about Ask.

An online comic site called XKCD figured that the marketing people at Ask would probably not have thought about ensuring that they were optimised for the phrases, and they were right. By setting up a Google Bomb for these phrases (you can read an explanation of Google Bombs here), XKCD now rank at #1 on Google for most of the catchphrases. They also rank highly on Yahoo!, MSN & even Ask!

The lesson here is that whilst marketing is always built around great ideas (and I’ll leave you to decide whether billboards with weird catchphrases scattered around America is a great idea), they always succeed or fail on the little things. So if anyone ever comes to you with a great marketing campaign, make sure that you do sweat the little stuff. You don’t even have to use SEO - Ask could have least have put some PPC budget behind this campaign!

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