May 18, 2000
Article

Yea/Nay: No Monkeying Around at Ask.com

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SUMMARY: No summary available
Who says bananas are just a good source of potassium? For
the savvy marketers at Ask Jeeves and DOLE, they seem to be
a pretty sweet marketing ploy. Instead of the usual
Chiquita Banana stickers, some bananas are now sporting
little "Ask Jeeves" stickers all over them. Each includes
banana-related questions such as "How do I make banana
cream pie?" or "Where do bananas grow?” The campaign, a
joint effort between Ask Jeeves and Dole (a definite Yea!),
has labeled 100 million banana bunches with stickers
featuring Jeeves, the world's first Internet butler, the
Ask.com URL, and questions related to bananas.

The fruit label campaign launched last November when Ask
Jeeves partnered with the Fruit Label Company and
California Apple Commission to label 15 million apples with
such as "Why is New York called the Big Apple?" The company
extended the campaign in March to include oranges, teaming
again with Fruit Label Company and the California Citrus
Mutual to label over 60 million navel oranges with
questions like "How much vitamin C is in a California navel
orange?" During the period of the apple campaign, Ask.com
saw roughly a 15% increase in apple-related questions.
Orange-related questions increased by nearly 30% on Ask.com
during the run of the orange campaign, says Abby Berens, PR
Specialist at Ask Jeeves, Inc. No word yet on the results
of the banana campaign, but we find it quite appealing.

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