Basically this site: http://www.information-revolution.org and it’s associated advertising try to position this organisation as a sort of free choice organisation campaigning against the dominance of Google. But it’s a campaign for Ask.
It’s truly terrible. A massive trainwreck of the highest order. I could write pages and pages of bitching, but I’m not going to. Just visit the site anlook at the comments (if they’ve not been taken down). Some of my favourites:
Viva la Choice!
I’ll choose anything but Ask!
You people at Ask need to re-think whose gonna run your media campaigns. I bet you’re all thinking “yeah but we got you on our site and engaged in discussion Keep trying… over the next 5 years i’m sure you might be able to gain some of the market share you are currently throwing down the toilet with this sham!!
Spend more money in making your search engine work properly and sack all those media muppets that came up with this information revolution idea.
And this I really love:
Shouldn’t your ad campaign appear at least 1X on your own search engine especially since it appears several times on Google.
That’s what happens when you hi-jack an insight (or in this case a genuine human concern) and trick people into coming to your site. Strangely they don’t like it. Fair play to them for leaving the comments open, but I bet they were wishing they hadn’t.
And they’ve spent shedloads on media both on and offline. And they’ve built a blog inside an i-frame, muppets ;-)
you just nicked my post ;-), I was half way bitching than I saw that…
If there’s anything that can really piss me off (apart from launching perfumes in 2nd life) is corporations wearing the grassroots gorilla mask.
it is so freaking pathetic.
what were they thinking????
do we know who’s the big brain behind this campaign?
yes – but it’d be unprofessional to say…
Oh dear!
I was meaning to check that out. Just like many others I thought it was a net neutrality thing
The one comment you liked the best was a mistake though. Ask does have this site indexed, only their “site:” operator works differently than Google’s:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/non-google-search-news/
See correction on bottom.
Great post. I just got back to the UK today and saw a couple of posters and a tube car panel advertising this on the way to work. Was amusing myself trying to guess who was behind it (totally failed – was leaning towards the info equivalent of Amnesty, or a really daring government education campaign…hmmm). Was intrigued by the revolutionary language and imagery juxtaposed with very traditional (expensive) media.
The comments are hysterical, but a stark reminder, as you say, that people prefer ‘the real thing’ to being hoodwinked. Off to copy some for future reference…