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."

Comments

Can't handle the load?

[jobeus]

"we were concerned that servers wouldn't be able to handle the load" -> Slashdotted already. :(

ugh

[AIX-Hood]

Mentioning "video" without the subsequent "torrent link" is asking for trouble.

Cool ads, but I don't think they promote Firefox

[norfolkboy]

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.

Re:Cool ads, but I don't think they promote Firefo

[norfolkboy]

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.

Not funny?

[AaronD12]

Um... am I the only one that thought those were not funny? Good special effects but special effects don't make things funny. Content makes things funny.

Yawn.

/Firefox user on PC; Safari on Mac

For or against FireFox?

[skoda]

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.

Re:For or against FireFox?

[Dracolytch]

The problem is, you're trying to recieve a consise message from an advertisement that does not have one. There is no underlying message, and they are suggesting very little.

The whole idea of this kind of advertising is to get your attention, and then show you a brand name. It's called brand exposure, and it's surprisingly effective. That's it, nothing more.

~D

Re:Cool ads, but I don't think they promote Firefo

[alienw]

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.

They're awful

[PickyH3D]

Maybe I do not get the humor of a person screaming, or a persons head falling off (I guess I grew out of that when I passed my teenage years??).

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.

Re:They're awful

[The-Bus]

I would have to agree. They are atrocious. Whoever is helping promote Firefox/Mozilla doesn't know what they are talking about. First, a full-page ad in the New York Times won't be read by that many people. That money could've been used to get some stories or PR to be run in AP and a thousand small local papers in the "technology" section. The NYT ad was a waste of money.

These ads, on the other hand, are even worse. They don't explain what Firefox is, they don't talk about it's advantages, and are therefore completely irrelevant. (Compare this to the AOL with Spamblocker buffet line ad, which is a lot better, even if the product isn't). Worse, they're not even funny. And then to top it all off, you try "viral marketing" them on a bunch of blogs --- these are people that already know about Firefox.

I can guarantee that infomercials running in the morning advertising Firefox for $4.95 would be loads more succesful than this crap.

Re:Totally offtopic....

[Laxitive]

I'll add one to that: writing your first serious application.

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 :) 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.

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

Classic problem with bad advertising

[RomulusNR]

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.