Doggone, Lycos Launches National Campaign

Lycos Inc. launched an integrated national advertising campaign aimed at building its brand and featuring “Lycos,” a black Labrador retriever who really knows how to fetch.

The campaign is designed to get both new and experienced Internet users to visit the new Lycos.com and make it their start page.

The ads tell users to “Go Get It” using Lycos, “the fastest and easiest way” to find what they are looking for on the Web.

The campaign integrates national cable television, drive-time spot radio, direct mail, and three-dimensional outdoor, print and online advertising.

Created in conjunction with Bozell Worldwide/New York and Bozell creative exec Rich Levy, the initiative is a natural extension of Lycos’ previous campaign, which emphasized the notion of Lycos as the “Personal Internet Guide.” Billings were not disclosed.

The “Personal Internet Guide” theme remains in the new campaign and is now represented by “Lycos,” the black lab retriever.

“Our initial campaign, which began in the spring of 1997, was successful because it addressed people’s fears of getting online and getting lost on the Web,” said Jan Robert Horsfall, vice president of marketing for Lycos. “Our latest consumer research — both qualitative and quantitative — showed that users are not afraid anymore about getting lost, they are simply getting annoyed by it. Users want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily without getting a ton of dead links and distractions.”

Lycos spent the past eight months researching and redefining the service’s infrastructure in detail to create the screen performance and ease of use that people want. In concert with MIT, Lycos studied thousands of user’s navigational habits through hands-on user testing and eye tracking studies to recreate a site that not only loads fast, but is also based upon how people search for things on the Web.