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Firefox New York Times Ad Hits the Presses
Dave writes "The long awaited New York Times ad for Firefox has finally hit the presses. Because of the vast number of donations the ad covered two pages of the newspaper. It's being timed to coincide with 11 million downloads."
I looked at the PNG linked to in the posting, and i have to say, I wasn't very impressed. It sounds like something written by a bunch of open source programmers.
They refer to the people who've downloaded it as "users". While, yes, they are users, I think the majority of the web browsing population doesn't use the term "user" when referring to themselves. Something like "... 10 million people from around the world..." would've sounded less geek-like.
Heck, a lot of people don't even separate the "web browser" as something that is distinct. They think of the web as the Internet, their monitor as their computer, their case as their hard drive, etc.
The ad did focus on the spyware, crashes, etc. which is good -- but, IMHO, they just didn't do it in the "average computer users" tongue.
Let's worry about that after Internet Explorer sinks below 50% on the usage charts.
That an advertisement, usually despised here, on the NY Times, a paper which cannot be linked here without some childish comment regarding registration is now A Good Thing(TM) on /.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I am thrilled that an open-source product has the popularity and support to achieve such an incredible goal. I don't remember any OSS product ever having so much exposure, Linux itself not withstanding.
I personally have converted at least five people at work and several other friends to Firefox, all of whom have nothing but praise for it. Any web sites that I maintain now say "Designed for use with Firefox" with a link.
Regarding the comments about "Who reads newspapers at this time of year" and so forth, you need to remember that the NYT is reprinted and read all over the world. This is not just a single newspaper in a single city. The NYT is also highly respected (not that it really deserves it), so a lot of people will read it.
The next step IMHO should be USA Today. That too is a globally printed newspaper and usually has a different reader base than NYT.
My only concern in that they might have set a precedence with including names of donors. Let's face it. How many of you who donated did so more (not only, but more) because of the "coolness" factor of having your name printed instead of the core purpose of supporting a great browser?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
You know, it's not that wonderfully designed. It looks nice, but in terms of marketing there are some serious problems.
The word "free" is only mentioned once and in tiny, tiny type. If I were reading the paper, and I didn't immediately avoid this ad in the first place, I would probably never see that reference. And, not knowing what Firefox is, I would assume there was a cost attached.
The giant "1.0" is worthless. The audience that this ad is targeting can get nothing useful from this information. They may see it and say "Of course it's 1.0; it's 'introducing'". Or they may see it and say "Firefox is out of beta?", but then this is a waste of advertising space for them, because they're already the wrong demographic. At worst they will see it and say "1.0? My browser is already 6.0", which is the opposite effect.
There's also very little quick information available to differentiate Firefox from the audience's existing browser. There's mention of pop-ups and a lack of crashing, but it's contained in boring testimonials and a tiny little afterthought paragraph that has the smallest text on the page.
Compare apples to apples not apples to pomegranates. Firefox has only been around for roughly 2 years. Go back to when IE came out and look at its performance at the same time period. I'm reasonably certain you would see a similar number of issues.
Considering Firefox has only been out for 2 years the number of issues it has resolved is staggering. Further, the vast majority of issues that users are having (80-90%) revolve around the users machines and not Firefox itself. People don't maintain their machines. They randomly install/uninstall apps and don't bother to do a good clean up.
Add in the amount of spyware infected machines and the issues that come from the infection and it's no wonder people are having problems. I've installed Firefox on 3 machines and I know of someone else who has it installed and not once has there been any issue. I even upgraded from the 0.7 version on two of the machines and installed the 1.0 version on a users machine which did have spyware but once I cleaned the machine I installed Firefox and the user has zero problems.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I disagree. It is true that there are a lot of web savvy users that read the NY Times, but, speaking from my experience of people I've migrated to Firefox, you'd be surprised about the number of them who had maybe *heard* of it, but hadn't given it enough thought to give it a try. Perhaps this will give them enough of a push in the right direction so that they will actually give it a try. It's hard to motivate someone to go out to a webpage and download a piece of software to replace an existing piece of software, especially when they still don't have a clear picture of how much better the replacement is. It's like convincing someone to change to a newer, better tasting cereal, when lots of them really are quite happy with the cereal they have... If only they'd try that new cereal, though, you know they'd be hooked.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
It's not just about advertising in the NY area, it's about getting it out to the media, making a splash. Many other media outlets will pick up the story and run it, as a story (without being paid). Hopefully it'll be an otherwise slow news day!
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Why is that?
I know I'm a Mac biggot and one of the excuses for not running Macs in a lot of schools is that its not what is run in businesses. This is also the excuse folks make for buying PCs as opposed to something more userfriendly for their situation -- I can run my business software at home with this so I can work virtual 100 hour a week jobs and get paid for 40 of them.
When you look at that tact and realize the truth behind it, it only makes sense that you put this ad into a paper that is going to get inside the minds of the PHBs and others that will determine what is run at work. Get a change going on in the workplace, where users see that this is a superior experience, and you will prompts folks to run it at home. Unlike all the rest of their 'work' apps, this one is free and doesn't come with any requirements that the end user needs to think about.
It then snowballs into everything else. When the parents running this realize they are paying property taxes to go to idiot school administrators (hmmm...I play one of those at times -- unfortunately, the apps I run *REQUIRE* IE because the field I'm in is so specialized we can't run to other platforms when its mandated that if you are an accredited institution, you will use the same tools as others in your field to validate and rank your populations), but the parents will complain that students are looking at porn and otherwise because of popups that aren't filtered at the firewall, and the schools will slowly change where they can.
And once you get this, it becomes word of mouth everywhere else. Personally, I won't fix my friends PCs any more...when they get bogged down with spyware and otherwise, I send them to browsers like this (my sis could barely use her computer because of all the crap that was hooked into her IE install -- most of which came directly from the cable company that installed her broadband). Since telling her to download this (and several spyware removers -- the IE spyware actually hijacked her where she couldn't even visit specific pages like AdAware's homepage), she's had little to no problems.
So, get it into the hands of the PHBs who will then make it a requirement that we use this, all the while thinking it was their good luck to see this, and why oh why didn't the geeks in the basement know about this years ago...
This strikes me as more of a vanity move than a real marketing move.
;-)
Appropriate. Don't forget, they appealed to people's vanity to raise the money. (And yes, my name's in the ad
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
I don't think that increasing browser awareness was the number one goal here. I think that having a fullpage ad in a major publication like the NYT is a way for Firefox to show its validity as an alternative browser. They're trying to say that they're not just a small fly-by-night operation, but someone with the potential to take on the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft.
Remember when Jobs came back to Apple, and they launched fullpage ads in the NYT, as well as Time and Newsweek? That wasn't meant to sell computers per se, it was meant to let the corporate world know that Apple was back. I think Mozilla is doing the same thing with this ad.
It appears to be working, judging by the amount of free press they're getting from the event.
I'll add that it doesn't even look particularly nice. Too much italics for one thing, and that ragged edge on the left page seems particularly jarring.
This is one of the few instances where justified type would look better. In this case, with a border on the right page, I think it would have looked much better. Then there is the way that the list of names only has a partial last line. This is easy to fix, anyone with experience designing for newspapers could think of several ways.
I assume that there is too much text to have fine enough control over the font size to do it so the easiest solution is probably to duplicate enough names to fill out that last line. Pick a few people who donated the most and it could even be fair (not that anyone would read that many names and recall the duplication).
People who make decisions that matter (CEO's, CIO's, VP's of IT departments, etc) don't read People or The Enquirer. They read the NY Times. I'm sure they've all heard of Firefox, but seeing a full-page ad in the NY Times says, "This is real" in a language they understand.
The word "free" is only mentioned once and in tiny, tiny type.
There are quite a few marketing negatives that go along with the word "Free," especially for software, such as "lack of quality," "unsupported," and "spyware-laden." The ad gives it the importance it deserves.
The giant "1.0" is worthless.
Not so. It is used pretty well here, actually. First, it establishes that this is a real product. Second, it establishes that it's a new product, which underscores the marketing message of opting away from something stagnant and old for something fresh and new.
There's also very little quick information available to differentiate Firefox from the audience's existing browser. There's mention of pop-ups and a lack of crashing, but it's contained in boring testimonials
Now you're just showing ignorance. Marketing has specific, limited objectives. In this case, it's prompting the set of readers who are sick of IE but don't know about alternatives to get interested and check out the web site. That's all. Cramming the page with browser features does not support the objective. And by the way, "boring" testimonials are highly effective marketing tools.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
At worst they will see it and say "1.0? My browser is already 6.0", which is the opposite effect.
This is brings out one of the greatest aspects of open source...they don't make something 1.0 until it really is a working version. Sure, closed source versions work and are generally higher quality than a non-1.0 open source project, but then they release 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 as if doling out candy on halloween. I don't know where I'm going with this, exactly, but I guess I just get a little peeved that users really will think version 999.0 of some closed source app is so much better than 1.0 of an open one.
Actually, a lot of the security in Firefox was patched on after the fact.
For example, older releases of FF/Mozilla had a ActiveX-type system that could popup an "Install Me" box when you visited a web page. When spyware makers started to abuse this, Mozilla simply changed the policy so it was impossible.
But, the only reason they could get away with this is that the feature had so few legitimate users outside of 1 or 2 known websites. If Microsoft did something similar, they would break thousands of legitimate applicaitons (this is where the popularity/installedbase argument comes into play).
Don't get me wrong -- FF did the right thing reacting quickly to Spyware installers, but it was still an after-the-fact reaction to a poorly designed feature.
The old argument about Mozilla was not that it was "Secure by Design", but that it was "A Great Developer Platform". Developer Platform means extendibility means opportunity for hacks/spyware. There's always going to be interesting new applications of the extentions/XUL stuff that Mozilla will have to keep an eye on.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
This strikes me as more of a vanity move than a real marketing move.
I paid for my name to be put in the ad. I admit it was purely for personal business reasons. I support and install Firefox all the time for me clients that are constantly bogged down in spyware. Having an NYT ad that will be framed on my wall with my name on it gives this unheard of browser more credibility in the minds of my clients. Gives me some free press as well even if I have to point it out to people.
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Spyware costs businesses serious money to support, it's simply so common that even the best managed networks of any size get infected constantly.
When organisations like Gartner are selling reports on it then it's an issue businesses are looking, and this ad will raise awareness about Firefox being one part of the solution.
I guess the fact that IBM was FORBIDDEN from pre-loading OS/2 on THEIR OWN PCs in order to sell Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 had NOTHING AT ALL to do with OS/2s demise. If you can't get an OS pre-loaded on a machine, and you're a business user, then you're not going to buy. Why spend money on 2 different operating systems.
Probably because their priority was to make sure it was in a format the NYT could use. I note that it was made by Adobe InDesign; extremely unfree software in every sense, but pretty well guaranteed to print correctly. InDesign uses OpenType to a much greater extent than any other DTP app, so it's probably some font issue that's the problem with other PDF apps. Also it's a huge amount of text to have on one page, possibly they're just overflowing -- as just about every non-Adobe implementation is based on GhostScript I think, a common bug would stop them all.
And of course Acrobat Reader is free, in the monetary sense, though I suppose you didn't mean that.