Slashdot Mirror
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."
You would prefer "Ten million people from around the world have downloaded the internet to their computer" ?
That is what I call redundancy !
People aren't *complete* idiots. Anyone who doesn't understand 'user' probably doesn't understand any of the concepts involved.
It's a self-policing system.
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.
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!"
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...