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Firefox Commercial Contest
Robbyboy writes "Mozilla announced an advertisment contest for the Firefox web browser, according to Information Week. They are asking Mozilla Fans to send them samples and the winners will receive prizes. The Contest is hosted at the Spread Firefox site" From the article: "Earlier this month, Mozilla launched the first phase of its Firefox Flicks campaign, which was a testimonial Web site in which fans could sing the browser's praise in short videos. To date, several dozen of the amateur clips, which vary widely in quality and have been submitted from more than 20 countries, have been posted on the site."
....that they do an out takes / freaks release a la viral advert style that can't be traced to them. everyone knows those reality tv shows that are talent contests are funniest when the contestants fail
seriously guys. how do you make something as arcane as auto insurance rates funny? you do it like Geico does. fact is, most people don't find what web browser they're using a terribly fascinating subject either. it might be hard for a lot of slashdotters to swallow, but one of the best ways to get people talking about Firefox is not throwing statistics at them or preaching about open source software. it's proper marketing. this is one of the reasons why Firefox has succeeded reasonably well so far versus, say, Opera. webmasters have 'get firefox' buttons on the bottoms of their web pages. taking it more mainstream would just be easiest, in my opinion, if a bit of humour was thrown in. i can't imagine what exactly it would be, but if you can make car insurance funny, you can make web standards funny too.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
I find this a much better idea than the opera-user-photo concept. I hope they release all the best submissions. They could be quite amusing.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
(Night time, Opening shot of sky above neighborhood) ...
(Pan in window showing various people in front of computers)
(Cue music "The Internet is for porn - Avenue q")
$sys$droids
Remember that Apple hippy chick?
"Beep, beep, beep."
Father, mother, daughter, desktop computer.
Daughter: "Daddy, the computer stopped working"
TRACK to Daughter walking to computer with Father following.
CUT to computer screen. Screen full of blinking ads and popups. Hint of pornographic content, but not directly on screen.
Daughter: "Can you fix it?"
Father: "I'll try"
Father sits down at computer.
CUT to side view of Father at computer, illuminated by glow from screen.
FADE to side view of Father at computer, looking at screen, intermittent typing.
Daughter (offscreen): "Is it fixed yet".
Father: No, not yet.
FADE to side view of Father at computer, head in hands.
Daughter (offscreen) "I need the computer to do my homework".
Father (annoyed): "I'm working on it".
Mother: (offscreen): "Honey, is this going to take long"? ...
Maybe they should change their name to something snazzier.
Involves thousands of paniced Japanese running through city streets screaming "MOZIRRA!!!!!! MOZIRRA!!!"
I am not left-handed, either!
Go ahead and mark this funny if you must, but seriously, has anyone considered targeting the adult entertaiment industry to gain firefox supporters?
I think its sad how much p0rn is on the web these days, but lets face the facts that its there.. so why not use it to our advantage.
Might Firefox only flesh pits be just the motivation needed to get firefox above and into the 25% user market?
Father: ???
Mother: Profit!
Post multiple copies of the same story about the Firefox contest!
> preaching about open source software
I agree that preaching must be avoided, but not mentioning that it is free software is a false economy.
People who don't value their freedom will let it slip through their fingers. i.e. they will install a bunch of proprietary plug-ins, and over time, Firefox will become a platform for a set of non-free plug-ins for browsing the non-free WWW.
...but the preaching has to be removed. Freedom and community could be mentioned without an explanation, and at least the user would then have the option of investigating for themself.
In business terms, freedom is the software's "unique selling point".
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I agree, on the Firefox Flicks globe, the videos I prefer are not the ones that talk about Firefox's features or "coolness", but the ones that are different and original. But there's plenty of other elements that are very appealing to people. For instance, I particularly liked a couple of videos from France, were some dude's little kids talk about Firefox. I don't even know what they're saying, but babies are cute, and the videos are cool to watch. Other stuff that sells: sexiness and puppies.
Hope somebody's taking note, I'm throwing gold at you, gold, I tell ya!
Favorite quote: "
Right! And we could honor an important part of the browser, such as the the Layout Engine. We could model him after the Geico mascot, which is a lizard or an iguana or something... and then we could give him a name, like the "Geico Layout Engine".
Of course, saying "Layout", "Engine" and the name of an auto insurance company brings up some wierd images.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
What about taking a bunch of stuffed animals and making a bondfire? Or they could use a real fox and get even more publicity once the animal rights people start making a fuss!
As someone who has ADD, I would just like to say that I find your comments offensive and insensitive and--hey, who wants to ride bikes!
I think you need to take a chill pill crack baby.
This is a good idea on behalf of Mozilla to save money when it comes to producing advertising. It's a good program, mine as well contribute if you can make a good commercial.
They have some pretty sweet prizes, too:
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Are those meant to scare people off? I think it's a Microsoft plot!
My guess: Superbowl.
Hmmmmm...Is Ellen Feiss using Firefox yet?
lots of these... (.Y.) Take a cue from the trash that is "popular" today... eMpTV, anyone? Maybe you have like a firefox mascot roll up in a limo, pop some bubbly and get freaky in da club with lotsa fine women. Oh, them curves is like BLAM!
Sadly, she's moved onto heroin.
Um...why?
Good products don't need advertisements. Bad products- or products indistinguishable from their competitors- need advertisements. When you have a lot of technically clued-in people encouraging friends, family and coworkers to use Firefox...and a market share that is going up...why do they need more?
I just don't get it. Open source isn't about taking over the world, but yet a lot of people seem to think that way. Guys (and gals)...that's exactly what got us in trouble with Microsoft.
Choice and diversity is GOOD, shockingly. What you should be doing is pointing coworkers to lots of different browsers and encouraging open standards support (ie, don't support browsers that have fussy behavior web designers must account for and/or don't support open standards.)
Choice and diversity encourage innovation, and assure users needs are met best. Here's a little parallel- I worked for an advertising agency that was owned by a holding company. The holding company is one of 3-4 of its kind, and together they own a massive percentage of the advertising firms out there. Yet the holding company frequently encourages multiple companies it owns to present proposals to the same client. Why? Better chance at getting one of -their- companies in the door is one reason, but another is that with 4 companies from "The XYZ Group"...well, the client has more selection, there might be a better fit between client and firm, and the client is liable to be happier with whoever they DO pick.
By the way- corporate needs aside, of course...do NOT ram Firefox, or anything else, down a user's throat. They'll quite likely resent it, look for excuses for it to fail or not meet their needs, etc. Where you can, be GENTLE and try to have it be their decision- not yours.
Please help metamoderate.
They should hire that fat guy.
I'm going to momentarily set aside the fact that this guy is a total nitwit, and pretend that an enlightened and rational person has raised that objection. Why do people care? Why would anyone spend time shilling for a free product, when doing so cuts into their porn-browsing time? In short, who gives a rat?
To answer the question, look back just a couple of years. IE had around 95% marketshare, despite not having done anything terribly interesting to improve the browser since it killed Netscape. Microsoft wasn't working towards supporting new, useful standards like CSS, XML, SVG, RSS, etc., because the incentives just weren't there. MSHTML was the standard, because there was no market for anything else. Security was awful, but the people who made the software just didn't care. Seriously, how much pride can you take in "doing things the right way," when you know for certain that the people developing for your browser will whine, complain, then find whatever dirty hack it takes to get things looking right on your browser?
Times have changed, and it's thanks in large part to the creation of Firefox and the Evangelical Geek Hordes swarming behind it. IE has lost a good chunk of marketshare, lazy webmasters are starting to understand that their website needs to work on multiple browsers. There is renewed interest in web standards.
Even IE is starting to improve its security and standards-compliance, while adding new features.
Before Firefox arrived, Internet Explorer was well on its way to becoming the MSWeb. Microsoft could decide which standards they thought were relevant to the user experience they wanted us to have, and to what extent they would be implemented. But since this power didn't translate well to revenue streams, they gave us the half-baked, annoying web browsing experience that they couldn't get us to pay for.
So long as alternative browsers have double-digit usage, the web will continue to be a more standards-friendly place. Standards don't sound terribly exciting at first, but they allow for all sorts of exciting niftiness that simply wouldn't be possible under a MS monoculture.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
A recent article elsewhere listed a number of problems reported by several hundred users of 1.5 - many of which I have experienced first hand.
While 1.5 doesn't slow down as quickly as the 1.07 when downloading images off the Net, it DOES slow down eventually and eat up all of Windows' virtual memory. Eventually it starts issuing "picture cannot be displayed due to errors" messages. In other words, severe memory leaks. These were supposed to be fixed in 1,5, but clearly have not been, although some may have been ameliorated somewhat.
It also seems to be slightly less stable than 1.07, with a slightly higher incidence of crashes (still thankfully relatively rare.)
If they start trying to add features to this code base, they'll get a rep for having a crappy browser on a par with IE 5. They need to fix these problems and fix them fast.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
What about a jar of jelly, but instead of jelly, it says FIREFOX... ahahha SPREAD FIREFOX, GET IT? ...
Anyway, if someone takes this idea, does it, and wins... well, at least think of me when you get your delicious prizes...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Will you work for Schlitz?
My Sysadmin Blog
There are no "products"- noone needs to sell anything to anyone. The issue is freedom, as in GNU/RMS."Open source" isn't "about" anything. If you want to download and use whatever software you want, well okay.
What is important is that people are free to do this. Which cannot happen when the defacto standard is a proprietary and secret platform (secret binary plugins, IE only sites etc). Going "open source! open source! FSF are hippies!" is the way to have people lose their freedoms because they're not even aware of the problem.
Join us now and share the software
www.funnyfox.org has been around for several months now, and offers 3 short funny clips advertising Firefox. They're flash videos right now, but could easily be adapted for the TV.
I was readng this Blog and the author speculates rise of Firefox power.
because this is Firefox everyone is all "Wow what a cool idea I can't wait to see what comes out!".
But if this was Opera the slashdotters would be out in force denouncing it as a pathetic waste of time.
We all do dumb things. Using Internet Explorer doesn't have to be one of them.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
IE supports more standards.
Please enlighten us as to which standards you're referring to. By standards, I mean standards that have actually passed through some sort of standards board, whether it be the W3C, ISO, ECMA, IETF, or some other standards body that I missed.
For example, Firefox 1.5 supports SVG, MathML, and fully supports PNG (IE doesn't do transparency), and has better support for CSS than IE6 does (Microsoft's IE Team lists a number of bugs that they're fixing for IE7).
, and doesn't have confusing and useless features like "tabbed" browsing (you have to have ADD to like this "feature").
Tell that to the IE7 developers. The IE Developer Blog says IE7 Has Tabs.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It is a great idea, and I would have loved to participate before 1.5 was released. Unfortunately, my experience with Firefox 1.5 was terrible. It ate up RAM like nobody's business, much moreso than previous versions, and ignored the settings to help keep it from doing that. I was upset when I noticed that it was using error pages instead of the trusty error dialog. It also would slow to a crawl when it was loading, something it's done to a much lesser extent in every version I've used. I didn't see anything that I could recognize as an improvement - it's just got more flashy bullshit, more resource usage, and less useability. I can no longer in good faith endorse Firefox to my friends and family.
The flicks, although a good idea, suck in practice. They're all badly recorded, low-res, volume screwed-over, web cam clips.
About the advertising, I have never seen any type of ad for FireFox before, aside from the non-animated, pretty much out of the way, banners.
I hope they don't go too far with the advertising. If it starts becoming obtrusive then they're going to have a lot more angry customers on their hands.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
...the Mozilla team has Adblock switched on. No winner will be announced.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
My commercial would feature the tag line.
Firefox. A truly excellent browser. Now if it would only stop nagging me to install plugins that I don't fucking want on my computer (like fucking Flash) then it might actually be usable.
I'm checking for updates the last weeks but there still is no fix for the latest JavaScript bugs. What should I do? There are more and more so called Web 2.0 sites. I can't disable JavaScript.
Oh wait, people would think it's a rerun...
If it was a print medium,photoshop could be a starting point for creating.But video left me stumped - theres a whole gamut outthere,that are quite complicated to use too......
So which software is fast, easy to learn,with decent results?
Why does yahoo do this
spreadfirefox.com insistence on not having a link to download firefox or at least firefox's main website has got to be the most asshat move of all time
So whether the product has bugs or not does not depend on the marketing.
Clever signature text goes here.
Father: Hey (girl's name) where are you going?
Daughter: With my neighbor, his computer always works.
(Pan to neighbor's computer, he's using firefox)
PunchLine: "Firefox. The web as it was meant to be."
get Noscript
Whitelist those "web 2.0" sites you need and ignore everything else.
Check out prices on real word TV ads. For $5K they will maybe film first two seconds.
Too bad Apple didn't use mozilla for the Safari engine. They might have donated their Think Different ad for this. The press alone would probably be huge.
When did "Web 2.0" become synonymous with "doesn't provide fallback mechanisms for when JavaScript is not available"?
The shareholder is always right.
I'm not aware of any publicly known security holes in Firefox 1.5 that rely on JavaScript. Link?
The shareholder is always right.
This one: http://packetstormsecurity.org/0512-exploits/firef ox-1.5.txt
Like Geico did. They didn't just make their commercials funny, they made them relevant. Who cares about car insurance? Anyone who wants to pay less for it, that's who. Who cares about Firefox? Anyone who wants to pay less for it... uh, wait a minute...
Evil Overlord Rule #86. I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.
That isn't a serious security hole (it's a permanent DoS but that's it, despite what the page claims) and it doesn't require JavaScript.
The shareholder is always right.