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OpenOffice.org Newspaper Ad Mockup Released
Benjamin Horst writes "The volunteer effort raising $10,000 to place at least two backpage ads in New York City's free daily paper Metro is now entering its second full week. We've collected over 10% of our goal already and continue to find new pledge donors at a healthy pace. Our project's purpose is to help 'cross the chasm' and bring awareness of OpenOffice.org 2.0 to the large number of computer users who stand to benefit from its broad feature set and range of useful capabilities. This is not the first time an open source project has sought a high-profile newspaper ad buy. In fact, our effort was directly inspired by the Firefox New York Times ad. Firefox's famous effort announcing its arrival on the world stage helped push it from about 10 million downloads to its current tally of over 185 million!"
Is it really worth the money?
Or do the presidents on Mt. Rushmore look especially uneasy?
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
I dont have anything against openoffice.. but comparing openoffice with Microsoft-office.. it still has looong way to go (you are free to disagree).. where as firefox beats Internet-Explorer quite easily.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the sample ad looks horrible?
Now that's a fugly ad. Compare it to the famous Firefox NYT ad - that one was beautifully well-designed, but the mockup for OpenOffice's ad looks like something that any amateur would put together in 15 minutes using MS-Paint and a pic ripped from a school book. Also, it is too in-your-face ideological, it barely mentions the app's qualities!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Please, someone help them and design a proper advert.
That looks like something put together in MS Paint. It really is a crap advert and does nothing for OpenOffice.org.
If you are going to spend a lot of money putting an advert in a paper at least make it worth your while and get a decent advert designed.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
- doesn't mention that OO.org can (usually) read/write .doc, .xls, .ppt documents
:/
- doesn't mention that it can run Linux and other O/S (I know Windows and Mac users are the target audience here, but the wide platform availability is one reason why I switched personally...)
- "Free Software for Free People" => doesn't quite work. It is not explicitly said that OO.org can be downloaded and installed for zero financial cost, but instead alludes that OO.org is "free" in the same sense that people are "free". A person can not cost anything (unless you are a slave), so... the ad draft doesn't communicate the important point of "free to download, free to install, free to use"
- don't even get me started on the bright yellow background. I know its a rough draft, but at least make it a *good* rough draft! If I saw something that cheezy/annoying/distracting/unprofessional in my newspaper, I would turn to the next page before I finished reading the title
Good intentions are there, but I need more faith in an ad that works if I'm going to shell out cash for this cause. I don't want to waste my donation money on an ad that doesn't advertise very well
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
If that's the ad mock up, I'll pass. It looks like something I'd see taped to a phone pole above a undecipherable Xerox of someone's lost cat.
I like OO and all (Especially when my $2500 computer came with a trial version of Office.......) but could they find one capable designer to donate 30 minutes of their time somewhere--anywhere in the project?
I might support a real ad in a real publication, but paying good money to distribute this visual hernia in the back of a disposable rag isn't going to bring credibility to anyone.
Be careful what you wish for.
The comparison of Open Office to Firefox is apples/oranges. Firefox is at least as accessible to the end user as IE, and is a better choice for many users. Open Office might not be as favorably compared to MS Office as Firefox is compared to IE.
Despite its flaws, code blot, and so forth - when I reach for my own money, I choose Open Office every time. I imagine that many NY Times readers will reach the same conclusion. Will NY Times do for Open Office what they did for Firefox? Only time will tell.
That ad looks like total shit. Seriously, it makes the OpenOffice.org project look like a joke. It's insultingly unprofessional design work.
The ads will says "World's best word process ..." and lists off all the products. These are tactics I expect from Microsoft, not the Open Source world. I know the name of the game is to get the most attention and the most people trying your product (especially at a $10k price tag to advertise) ... that I respect, but OO.Org is definitely not the best software package for those jobs. Don't get me wrong -- it's really good, it's growing, and I use it and love it. The tactics suck, plain and simple. This advertising is no better than we see from any other large corporation. There's obviously enough creativity in the open source community to be able to hit these ads from a multitude of other angles that are more truthful. I think it's unfortuneate and I hope the strategy is altered before these ads go to market, especially because MS Office power users (note: not necessarily day-to-day users) are going to be disappointed and word-of-mouth can be equally detrimental as it is good.
How is the grammer[sic] wrong?
It isn't good enough on it's own merits... ok that's bollocks, but word of mouth is far more valuable and cheaper than taking out adverts in a newspaper. Hell it's something that all the ad agencies are trying to fake just now anyway.
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The advertisement professes very little of the capabilities of which it can perform, moreso, the fact it provides indpendence from the Office Suites people pay money for usage. The fact the programs in Open Office are quite expansive and offer a very well integrated ability to best the products people "pay" to make their lives easier. I don't feel that the Mt. Rushmore with the ubiquitous yellow "...for idiots" color is beneficial in the developement of which they created. The programs are, and many would argue, easily to use for the purpose they provide. I helped a friend to use it and they were very grateful at the purpose the tools were developed. I like how you are able to take a break and load the spreadsheet; type in "=GAME("StarWars") and take a minute to smile at the few moments of gameplay before toiling again. I think the developers are worthy of Advertising what they have accomplished but wish they did it in a better way than something archaic...IMHO
The advertisement doesn't really say exactly what it does, why it is good or why it is worth downloading.
For years security experts and geeks have been telling users to "be very careful with free software" to avoid malware and other nasty junk, and this ad quite frankly looks like some of the armature SPAM I have received in my inbox, if I saw an ad for this it doesn't make me want to download it or trust where it is coming from.
For 10K I would take a different approach, the best advertising is word of mouth so I would do something like Mac did in the early 90's, fund schools with software/hardware and a learning program for the software, if it impresses schools then more schools will happily adopt it, plus each kid could be given a free copy to take home to practice on.
10K could do one classroom in one school, but the word of mouth and the publicity from a company trying to help education would be priceless.
Seriously, Metro is not a paper of note. It might be picked up for a quick read on the subway or for lunch by some NY office workers but it's certainly not the caliber of other free papers like the Voice, NYPress or even the Onion. I can't imagine it will get Open Office much return for their investment.
Wouldn't that $10,000 be better spent on banner ads on high traffic site or Google adwords? Then they'd reach a worldwide audience, and the reader would be literally seconds away from downloading the suite for themselves.
OpenOffice.org is really jumping the gun here, and I think it's gonna backfire pretty hard.
... and being annoyed by it.
I do use OpenOffice on a daily basis, and I love it. However, it's still dog-slow and clunky in some parts, unfinished or unpolished in others, and buggy here and there. You have to get to know its individual quirks. I tried getting my Microsoft Office-loyal boss to use it for a while, and he gave it up pretty fast. He found a number of things that he was used to doing in Excel that he couldn't do in OOo.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the project or the efforts of its contributors, nor can I stand up and say that I've contributed code or money to it. What I am saying is, they haven't reached the level of completeness that Firefox had reached before the Firefox ad came out. Couple that with a typically glacial development and release process, and you'll get hordes of new users checking it out
And, yeah, ditto the "holy cow, that's an ugly ad" comments, too. It looks very amateurish to me.
Lose the freedom/hippie theme and appeal to wallets. How much does MS office cost these days?
Don't worry, version 2 of this ad will be created by professional designers! Nothing gets a designer to come out and help like putting something out there for them to criticize.
Much better would be for this discussion to focus on the real issue of the fundraising effort. Thinking about the target market, the choice of NYC as the location, questions about the number of daily readers of this paper (450,000, in fact), thoughts around the Tipping Point concept of Malcolm Gladwell, reaching a new crowd of non-geeks and home/small business users, etc. These are the valuable points we should be talking about! Not the draft, mockup ad that will soon be superceded.
Don't say "free" software. People associate "free" as in free beer with cheap. Remember the saying, "There's no free lunch"? Especially in a field filled with adwares, "free" can set off alarms. Why would these guys offer free software? There's must be a catch. That's what the viewers will think. Use open or some other word that makes people think "free as in freedom".
EvilCON - Made Famous by
NeoOffice doesn't require X11, works with OS X's native fonts and printing system, supports all OS X's text input methods (Japanese, Chinese, etc.), and is much more attractive and snappy as of 2.0a.
OK, show of hands: who would trust proofreading done by this person?
With the majority (by far) of comments remarking on the utter badness of the ad, both aesthetically and in terms of its content, I should point out the following note when this was submitted:
This is just a draft, and we are in search of your feedback and suggestions!
I can only assume the ad will be replaced with something a lot, LOT better. Maybe it would be a good idea to get that part straight before soliciting for cash?
I'd like to see:
* What OOo is.
* Why you would use it.
* Compatibility with MS Office
* Compatibility with WordPerfect (?)
* Save-to-PDF and other standout features
* Who brought you this ad, and why they did it.
* NeoOffice as an interoperable alternative for OS X.
Whoa. That was triangular.
All the above could be done in a really clever way. A cool graphic. A slogan. Something that grabs your attention and then makes you read more. A contest or something might help to facilitate the best idea(s) floating to the top.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the sample ad looks horrible?
Just basic stuff, like the absurd hyphenation of "all-in-one" in that context... it screams "high school marketing project," and conveys the sense that the technology effort might not be any more fully executed.
Combine that with the low-brow attempt to appeal to some reflexively counter-culture audience, and the tone is just plain wrong. The project doesn't need more hipster nerds using the software, it needs more corporate IT people to like it. And those folks are not going to talk their bosses and users into using it on the grounds that doing so makes a political statement or somehow "gets even" with profit-oriented companies. Come on! It's profitable companies you want to attract, and conveying that whole "business is teh evil" atmosphere will do more to alienate prospective users than pretty much anything else.
And, of course, never mind that Excel can still kick its ass, which makes the "world's best" claim just transparently false... and isn't that sort of hucksterism the very thing that the F/OSS most hate about software from The Man?
Better to have a contest with marketing/design students - they've got a vested interest in building up their portfolios and can really use "won contest" on their resume. And, they may actually have a clue about how punctuation, capitalization, clauses, verbs, and those other little details play a role in communication.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Man, that ad is bad. But at the same time, I've lived in new york for a long time now and I still don't know anyone who's actually looked at that paper. So we're not in danger of anyone actually seeing it.
I wouldn't trust his proofreading but I bet he can ask if you'd like fries with that.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
I just saved $10. It felt good. Please consider making a decent design.
Hi, I did an interview with Ben Horst for Mad Penguin. You can read the interview here, if you would like more info about Ben's effort to start this grassroots OOo ad campaign:
http://http//madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=7036/
Firefox is arguably much better than its competition, IE, but OpenOffice is arguably worse than the competition, Office.
I blame geof's speakers.
Hi DoD, Ben just emailed me with the link to this /. article, and so I know that he is reading it now.
/. If people don't like the ad, it would be really helpful if people could 1) make some detailed constructive criticisms, or 2) maybe do a quick mock-up themselves, so that we could improve it.
WRT to quality of the ad, I'm thinking that Ben's idea was probably "release early and often" in the hopes that he would spark a discussion such as we are getting now on
Thanks again for contributing to the effort, DoD!! Christian Einfeldt
How about adding something about how OpenOffice is the first app to support the newly standardized Open Document Format? That's seemed to have worked a few times for me.
Maybe they should spend their money on making their website,download, and install process a little more streamlined. I've told tens of people that were in need of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to just go get OpenOffice. ~80% came back to me needing help downloading and installing the software. Yes, these people are definitley not the best at figuring it out, or trying different things, or even reading instructions on a website, but if openoffice.org provided an interface on their site to download as easily accessible as the one on getfirefox.com, they would immediatley have a larger user base.
1) Don't make users choose a mirror. Users don't have any clue what that means. Figure it out yourselves, but leave the option open for "advanced" users. The torrent is a nice touch though for the "advanced" options.
2) Provide direct links for the most likely platforms. Sadly this means Windows. On the front page. In huge fonts. (Just do it)
It's a good start, but it's going to take a lot more than a few ads here and there to make the M$ crowd realize there are better alternatives available. I believe the best way to introduce people to this "new technology" (lol) is by word of mouth.
What part of producing an xml document "requires" Java?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
The design for that looks fuglier than StarOffice 5 did. I mean, that had to really take some hard work to make something look that horrible. And the content isn't any better. "They'd download it." WTF were they thinking? If they actually put this ad in a paper, the best thing they can hope for is that people don't remember it. This could only have a negative impact on OOo's adoption among non-tech people.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
I don't want to be a grammar Nazi, but I think that what you meant was "you'd would."
Hell, I'd put $10 towards them *not* running the ad. Anyone with me? If we hit $10,000 first they agree to not post that eyesore?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
In the not too distant past . . . OpenOffice people realize that people are actually expecting them to run some sort of ad using their donations
OOOOOOOOHHHHH SHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIITTTTTT!
and they smash this traffic accident of a design together in the hopes that everyone is so horrified that someone with some brains and aesthetic sense gives them something better to use
. . . seriously, this ad is the perfect example of what is wrong with OpenOffice in comparison to Firefox:
1. OpenOffice is not as good as the commercial software it's trying to compete with, and so it is sort of hard to come up with a marketing-type message.
2. The software itself, while functional, lacks any sort of cohesive vision or raison d'etre beyond "hey, what do you want? It's free"
3. It looks like crap. I know this is hard for many of you programmers out there to hear, but if your application *looks* like crap, people are going to think it *is* crap, no matter how good it actually is.
4. Whereas Firefox took their message to the New York Times and built-up a lot of well justified hype, the OpenOffice folks came up with something that looks like a cross between a church picnic flyer and a political manifesto that maybe a dozen clueful people will read and understand.
Why? Why spend money on ads like this?
I work in an industry full of stuff like this. Everyone outside the industry calls it "the media". Everyone inside calls it advertising. The purpose of a newspaper is to sell ads. The purpose of television programming is to sell ads. The purpose of most web sites is to sell ads. Eventually, if you deal with it day in and day out, you start to despise the system.
So you load up Linux and start playing with something like OpenOffice. You enjoy the lack of commercial draw. You enjoy the movement away from advertising, into the realm of products shipping on their own worth.
Then you see people throwing away money on ads that could be better used elsewhere. Honestly, the first thing that came to mind was, "Those thousands of dollars could go to a worthwhile charity and do more good for the cause."
Maybe I'm just tired. I simply hate commercial advertising for a product that has so much more going for it.
Also, if I've structured an OpenOffice document by using styles (Heading 1, 2, 3), that creates bookmarks in the PDF document when I export it, even nesting the bookmarks in a hierarchy.
At least for this purpose, which I use a lot, OpenOffice is better than MS Office. I've been trying to figure out how to keep copies of web-pages with the links intact, or to keep a collection of Slashdot and Panda's Thumb posts while keeping the links, and OpenOffice works really well. Also, Openoffice can be run from a USB stick if you download the version from Portableapps.com. That beats the hell out of MS Office.
That has nothing to do with the article at hand. But don't you feel better anyway?
Well, that and actually run the ad in a subscriber-based newsparer, such as the Times, instead of a free rag.
Seriously, that ad is going to attract noone.
Have you ever seen Metro? It's a cheap (quality-wise; we know it's free), informationless tabloid that's handed out (and usually refused) in the New York City subways. It does not represent a "young, affluent, and savvy demographic" -- it represents people slightly above those who read the supermarket tabloids, and who would like not know how to download and install OOo.
As for calling the proposed advertisement as bad as a "high school design project" -- that's a bit of insult to high school design projects. I was creating more professional stuff back in 9th grade.
Why is "Benjamin Horst"'s name in the ad?
Since when do ads have "producer credits"?
Is this an ad for OpenOffice or a chance for some guy to get his name in the paper?
This ad is so awful that it looks like an attempt to sabotage OpenOffice. The design is terrible, the message is confusing, and it will look even worse on newsprint. Did Microsoft have something to do with this? Anybody competent could do better. The first line ought to read something like this.
Free office software. No purchase necessary. No fees. No subscriptions. Nothing to pay, ever. No ads. No spyware. No limits on use. No limits on copying. No charge for upgrades. No kidding.
How is this possible? OpenOffice is free software, developed by hundreds of users and companies worldwide. ...
Now if only there was some way we could squeeze a cliché into that.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
it looks like the ad was made with openoffice.
I couldn't agree more.
Oh, and for the grandparents kids: there is a thing that is called "Fontwork Gallery". I suspect that "WordArt" or whatever it's called in MS Office, was too risky to take over. It's in the "Drawing Toolbar" and the icon looks like an "A" in a frame.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
My own OpenOffice.org mockup ads , see if you like them.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Just last week a couple of friends (non technical people) mentioned to me that they'd switched to OO after powerpoint let them down badly - apparently Powerpoint runs presentations at different speeds on different machines and requires the same fonts installed so when they took their expensively produced presentation and decided to use it for an important meeting on a different machine it looked like complete crap and ran at 10* normal speed (it was synchronised with a soundtrack so needed to be *exactly* the same speed).
Importing to OO fixed it, but messed up the colours slightly. It was still usable though.
I heard about it when they started cursing Microsoft... These aren't the people I would normally have expected to know what OO was and definately not the standard slashdot types.. but they all (well, a group of 5 of them) switched to it because Office let them down at a crucial moment.
Of course this is a place where backward compatibility doesn't really matter - documents are produced for the moment, so ODF is fine.
not everyone has either the time to relearn it, or someone to call to walk them through it.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
FOSS says, "Are you coming, or what?"
To which I reply to OO.o: No, you aren't mature enough for an ad to take on Microsoft Office. Maybe in 5 years. Now get to work.