The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Tonight We're Going to Advertise Like It's 1999

Some people need to look at their high-school yearbook to get all misty-eyed and nostalgic. But for us at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab, all it takes is an old copy of The Industry Standard.

So imagine our surprise this week when, on a group outing to Manhattan's Upper West Side, we passed by a well-preserved relic from Wall Street's distant past: an outdoor advertisement for an Internet portal. Yes, there it was, slapped on the side of a pay-telephone kiosk at the intersection of Broadway and 78th Street: an ad trumpeting the merits of Internet information site Ask Jeeves (ASKJ Quote).

The youngsters in the lab -- kids for whom "InfoSeek" and "WebCrawler" might as well be AOL screen names -- stared wide-eyed, agape. Search-engine advertisements on the street? Didn't these cease to be long ago, around the time that Latin and rotary telephones died out?

Well, as we studied the ad -- one in which the Jeeves butler-type character promises, "Find anything you need in a New York second!" -- we began to think that not only was this ad remarkable, but it was remarkably Dumb.

A few reasons popped to mind. First off, there's a good reason nobody's pitching portals in outdoor ads (or on TV, or on radio, for that matter) anymore. As a few hundred bankrupt companies have taught us, placing ads for Internet content companies anywhere but on the Internet can prove to be extremely inefficient. If you don't believe us, we have a few reels' worth of Super Bowl dot-com ads to show you.

What Jeeves?

The second reason: Nobody in New York -- we mean nobody -- uses the expression "New York minute," mock-altered in the ad to read "New York second." The expression, which usually means something more like a second than a minute, is strictly for out-of-towners, just like the expression "New York-style delicatessen."

Finally, what's with this "New York second," anyway? Yeah, we know it's supposed to be a speeded-up version of an N.Y. minute, but it's already speeded up. It's like changing "Texas tea" in The Beverly Hillbillies theme song to "Texas oil," or calling Harvard "the Harvard of the Ivy League."

Be all that as it may, after we called up Ask Jeeves to ask Jeeves what the heck is going on, we had to admit there was some method to this madness.