FirefoxFlicks Winners Announced

prostoalex writes "The FirefoxFlicks competition has announced the winners of the Firefox video promo campaign. The winning videos are DareDevil, Wheee!, Fox Fever, This is Hot and Give me the the soap."

Comments

Weee IMO was the best...

[gregbains]

...Only because it is the only one I ever saw, based on viral ability alone it wins

Wonder who's paying the bills for bandwidth

[ziplux]

Mozilla presumably needs all the funding they can get. Where are they getting the money to pay for a site like this?

by far the funniest and most clever (IMO)

[yagu]

Wheee! Almost peed my pants. Played it over and over, this is funny on many levels, reminds me of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, where little kids laughed, but there is an adult element that is hilarious.

As far as being effective for general advertising, I'm not sure... It may succeed on the level of getting people talking about it, "Do you GET that new Firefox commercial", or not. It's a bit of a wink and a nod to the tech demographic (taunting especially Microsoft and Netscape).

If I were making a SAFE choice for mass consumption, I'd probably go with the "Give me the Soap". Simple, mass appeal, cute, cuddly, with a clearly stated message. If I had some extra money, I'd produce and run both. If I had money to burn, I'd definitely do the Wheeee! just for fun.

Good job to all winners.

marketing the browser internationally

[mapkinase]

I have afollowing concern about the name of the browser in regards to international marketing:

In Chinese and Russian folklore, fox is an cunny evil treacherous animal. Given, tech community which does not care much about it already accepted firefox, but what about the general populace (target of the commercial number 5)? Does anybody care about folklore?

Statistics on Firefox popularity in Russia

[mapkinase]

statistics of browser popularity in Russia

joke of a contest

[erbbysam]

This contest was more of a joke than the jokes in the SNL that's on right now... Here
They got rid of there blog(Here) after a lot of the entrants posted "comments" questioning what happened to it. Read the comments on that page to see the problems but here's a sum up of what the general story is:
Facts:
-Before I say anything about the videos this is how the contest was to be done (Herel)1) Concept (30%); 2) Production Quality (30%); 3) Script/Screenplay (20%); 4) Use of Firefox Logo, Name, or Tagline (10%); 5) Jingle or Soundtrack (10%). The winners were all in the first 20% of the videos posted. Only around 30% of the ads have been posted.
-The winner of the competition "Daredevil" was posted online Apr. 11th on the firefoxflicks.com website...the contest ended Apr. 14th. This ad incorporates ALMOST NONE of the guidelines set forth other than the fact that she actually uses a browser. (And it's a clear of the recent coca-cola and American express ads... that's more of a rumor though but you decide for yourself)
-"Wheee!" was in complete denial of the FAQ that they posted (specifically Here) that said that other logos could not be used without permission and yet there goes IE, Netscape and Safari(not to mention the TOS on those logos on there websites(which can also includes modifying the logos in any way))
-"Fox Fever" had no video production quality other than that is was trying to be cheesy which can be argued to have not fallen under the scoring system set forth by the rules.
-"This is Hot" deserved to win more than an honorable mention. It fit the "rules" set forth perfectly and has a very high production quality that (in my opinion) can take on some super bowl commercials.
-"Give Me the Soap" was cute and could fit the rules perfectly.
-It starts to appear that the actual "winners" were not exactly following the rules and guidelines of the contest and the two honorable mentions fit it perfectly (which is probably why there were 2 "honorable mentions" because there wasn't any mention that there was going to be).

Rumors:
-I'll quote myself for the first "rumor":
"the only concern I have about the judging is that the 5 winners were among the first 25% up... I'm not to good at stat but doesn't that mean the odds of that happening unintentionally (5 hits within 25%) 1 in 1024(4^5) (or one could even argue 20% (5^5: 1 in 3125))? If the first ones up were a "cross-section" as noted earlier doesn't that imply that they weren't the best of the best? ...sorry if that was a bit confusing
"# Asa(one of the firefoxflicks staff Says:
April 25th, 2006 at 8:16 am
cleancut, I don't think it was purely our idea of "the 50 best ones". We posted what we thought was a good cross-section of ads, from humorous to serious and everything in between. We certainly tried to launch the site and build early momentum by highlighting a set of ads that we thought would be compelling and entertaining to a broad audience.
- A
" "
-NONE of the judges ever said a word about the contest ANYWHERE. try googling one the famous "judges" names and firefoxflicks and the only page that will come up is that the list of them on firefoxflicks.com. This lead to ALOT of speculation that some of the videos (Wheeeeeeeee) were picked because of the instant popularity when they were put on the site and not by market viability (or the "rules"). Also all of the judges apparently viewed all 2.5 hours of commercials in LA over 5 days even though they are all working on movies in various parts of the world. But that's probably because the firefoxflicks team forced them to this deadline to be at the SF film fest which wasn't the original plan.
-The firefoxflicks team will never be able to use some of the ads (Wheeee