INTERNET Ask Jeeves pushes $6M campaign, excluding butler

The campaign aims to gain more respect for the fifth-place search engine.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- It cost online search engine maker Ask Jeeves Inc. more than $100 million to create a well-known brand built around a drawing of a dainty butler.
Now Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves is spending a little more money to let people know there's more to its search engine than a cartoon.
In its first major marketing push in two years, Ask Jeeves is touting its search prowess in a $6 million campaign consisting of billboard and magazine ads that exclude the butler that serves as the company's mascot.
The butler isn't retiring -- he remains prominently featured on Ask Jeeves' Web site. But by keeping Jeeves the butler out of the ads, the company is hoping consumers will try to find him.
"If the butler isn't there [in the ads], we think more consumers might wonder what happened to him and come to our site to see if he's still around," said Ask Jeeves President Steve Berkowitz. "We are trying to communicate the message that there is something different going on at our company."
Little respect
The unusual strategy takes aim at a frustrating problem for Ask Jeeves, which encourages Web surfers to submit search requests in question form.
Although Berkowitz believes Ask Jeeves has built a search engine "second to none," it isn't getting much respect on the Internet.
Ask Jeeves accounted for just three percent of U.S. searches in June, ranking it a distant fifth behind Google (32 percent of searches), Yahoo (26 percent), AOL (20 percent) and MSN (15 percent), according to data compiled by comScore Networks.
The meager share of the U.S. search market contrasts with Ask Jeeves' bigger slice of total traffic. The Ask.com Web site attracted 16 million visitors in June, or about 13 percent of Internet search traffic, comScore said.
"A lot of people know about us; they just aren't using us," Berkowitz said.
It's a weakness Ask Jeeves couldn't afford to address until recently.
Progress
Like a lot of Internet businesses, Ask Jeeves curtailed its once-prolific spending during 2001 and 2002 to survive the dot-com shakeout.
In 1999 and 2000, the company spent $116.9 million on sales and marketing. The branding blitz paid for a 70-foot butler balloon that floated over Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and 15 million labels of the grinning mascot that were affixed to apples sold in 8,000 supermarkets.
After sustaining a $425 million loss in 2001, Ask Jeeves began to recover in late 2002 and became even stronger this year.
The company earned $12.1 million through the first half of this year, reversing an $18.9 million loss at the same time last year. The turnaround has helped make Ask Jeeves' stock one of Wall Street's favorites this year, with the shares rising by more than 400 percent since the end of 2002.
For all of its progress, Ask Jeeves wouldn't be in such good shape if not for a partnership with Google, one of the search engines targeted in its ad campaign. Advertisers that used Google to bid for prominent listings in search results accounted for 49 percent of Ask Jeeves' revenue in its most recent quarter.