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Firefox Promo Videos
sebFlyte writes "Last week Mozilla Europe launched some extremely funny promotional videos for Firefox and ZDNet is reporting that they're spreading across the net like wildfire." From the article: "This is just the beginning -- I only posted it on my personal blog and it's already spreading nicely...We wanted to start small as we were concerned that servers wouldn't be able to handle the load."
"we were concerned that servers wouldn't be able to handle the load" -> Slashdotted already. :(
A lot of the older generation has no idea what ActiveX is, how harmful it can be... it would be swell to see Firefox maybe try to get the attention of more casual, not-so-savvy PC users.
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
Mentioning "video" without the subsequent "torrent link" is asking for trouble.
The adverts are certainly cool, I enjoyed watching them.
BUT, although they mention FireFox, they don't give much clue as to what it does, other than "it's something to do with computers".
I can't see this converting anyone.
Sure, there is a link to download FF at the end, but users these days really should be discouraged from downloading something just because "the advertiser says so". Aren't we working against that culture?
I really think the adverts need to make more noise about what firefox is and does.
This is screaming at the top of its lungs for a bittorrent
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
sorry - that sounded a bit harsh. I think it's great that people are trying to promote FF.
I just don't feel the "blank and mysterious" adverts of the dot-com-bubble era are the right way to do it.
Yawn.
/Firefox user on PC; Safari on Mac
I watched these movies a few days back, and found them amusing, but I didn't understand their message. Are they suggesting that using e.g. IE is so devastating to the user that his head will pop off? Or is using Firefox so horrible that he scream in horror? Or are these good things, to show how remarkably different Firefox is from the competition?
Cute videos, but I have no idea what they're trying to communicate.
ShoutingMan.com
I don't see the hype. They were vaguely amusing at best, certainly not the hilarity people are talking about. I suspect it's just the novelty of seeing a fairly polished video advert for an open-source project that is impressing people. Really, if they were promoting any other product, would people even bother talking about it?
Looks like you don't know much about marketing. You don't want to give the viewer much clue as to what something does. If you say up front "It's a web browser", people will think "oh ok i already have one, goodbye". If you make them think "what the hell is firefox?", they will click on the link and read the sales pitch on firefox.org (and quite likely download and try it). Much more effective.
Stupid modern marketing and going for shock value instead of features. The notebook and office ones do not even show Firefox, aside from the link at the end. Oh ya, some rediculously stupid ad for it is going to intrigue me into downloading something.
Feel/Taste/See the difference? TASTE? These are some of the worst "ads" I have ever seen.
I'll add one to that: writing your first serious application.
:) You could also use 'or' to delimit multiple queries on the same line. No 'and's, though, since you could just simulate that by typing out the queries on successive lines.
I annotated my entire collection which I traded on IRC. Since many fserves wanted certain things, and not others (no low-qual pics, no b&w pics, only lesbians, etc.).
I wrote an app in python that parsed a manifest file that described all the files in a particular directory, and then let you trawl it using arbitrary boolean queries over boolean, integer, and string fields.
The exact usage of the app went like this:
reset (reset the set of working files to all files)
men = 0 (remove any pic with men)
women >= 2 (remove any pic with less than 2 women)
hc = true (remove softcore pics)
dump (dump working set to screen and pipe it through more)
That's how you searched for HC lesbian pics
Oh man. I was so proud of myself when I got that written. I was 15 years old, just learning python. It was the first time I had programmed something that was of actual use to me.. that helped me in some real, tangible, immediate way. My IRC fserve efficiency went up an order of magnitude after that. Porn is a more powerful motivator than you can ever imagine. Especially for 15 year old boys with a lot of time on their hands. Ah, good times... good times.
-Laxitive
These guys clearly either haven't really done much work in advertising... or else they have, and failed miserably.
What must be the number one problem with a lot of advertisements over the past couple of years, especially for new products, is that the advertisers spend too much time being weird, funky, shocking, and funny, and COMPLETELY FORGET ABOUT THE FRICKIN' PRODUCT.
At any given moment I can rattle off a commercial I've seen whose content really stuck with me, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what the hell they were advertising.
Like that Dodge Ram commercial where the middle aged guy is making the two salespeople turn the truck back and forth.
Wait a minute, that's not a Dodge Ram commercial at all, it's a Vehix commercial. Well, at least we were close with this one, it's car related somehow.
Or what about those commercials about the company with the tech support department that is so good it can tell you if something is funny? Wait, that's for TBS. Who doesn't actually provide that service at all.
And these ones are for that website thats so crazy and shocking that it makes your head explode. Right?
These ads don't say anything - I mean, nothing at all - about what's good about Firefox. All they say is that it'll make you scream, or decapitate you. A little balance with some message of benefit might help.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.