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!"

Comments

Is it

[gerbalblaste]

Is it really worth the money?

Re:Is it

[c_fel]

I dont think so especially with the poor design they show on their mockup. Personnally I find this ad totally non-informative. More, maybe it's because I'm canadian but I think the "They'd download it" is totally inapropriate. Hell, they'd not download it, they don't know what's a computer.

My 0.02$.

Re:Is it

[admactanium]

hate to say it but this is a pretty bad ad. every aspect of it is really lacking and is definitely not worth the money in its current state. creating an ad to run in the wsj isn't something that should be taken lightly. i've done it a number of times (with other people's money of course) and on such a big stage you'd really want to polish any communications to highest degree, especially for an ad effort that will draw press to itself. this ad will probably do more to hurt the cause than help it. it's so unprofessional-looking the average user will be forced to wonder if they couldn't lay out a better page in microsoft word.

Re:Is it

[mboverload]

I agree, it's pretty horrible. I'd consider donating if they came up with a really nice one like Firefox had.

Then again they need to improve their product more before they launch it. Making it less bloated than Microsoft Office is a good goal. I mean...come on? Slower than Office? How is that possible?

Re:Is it

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

"I dont think so especially with the poor design they show on their mockup. Personnally I find this ad totally non-informative. More, maybe it's because I'm canadian but I think the "They'd download it" is totally inapropriate. Hell, they'd not download it, they don't know what's a computer."

From the fine web page;

"Your comments and feedback are requested and encouraged. Please submit them to the Google Group mentioned above so that all interested volunteers can participate in the discussion."

I don't know, it kind of looks like something you would see in a newspaper but if you can do better - let them know about it!

Re:Is it

[Anonymous Coward]

Slower than Office? How is that possible?

http://java.sun.com/

Re:Is it

[Lumpy]

Problem is they put almost ZERO effort into the AD. It looks as cheezy as a mid 80's Cable TV advertisment. Hell the Comcast "Comcastic" ad's have less cheeze level than this does.

Getting a student or two at an art school to make a top notch advert worthy of a back page ad on a newspaper is really stinking easy.. Most students kill for something to put on their resume and having it published is even a bigger bonus to get the students signing up.

The Mock-up is worse than some of the low refinance rates flash ad's all over the net (Gawd that moster playing a love song one sucks worse than most flash animations on albinoblacksheep.com)

If they want to do this they nered to first get a national newspaper class add created. Not that hard and will cost nothing if they apprioach it right. THEN go asking for money.

Re:Is it

[kremvax]

No, not if it's Metro.

That's the free throwaway 10 pager they pass out by the subways. The articles are sub-par, even for a free fishwrap. This won't have an impact on a literate, decision making crowd.

If they want to foster adoption, take out a quarter pager in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. People who have the clout to have their companies adopt a new and better office platform read those.

Re:Is it

[OECD]

Getting a student or two at an art school to make a top notch advert worthy of a back page ad on a newspaper is really stinking easy..

Given that the credits read "Design by ..." I suspect this is exactly what they're going to do. They could have made it a bit more obvious, though.

Re:Is it

[gravis777]

Its awful. It looks like someone came up with it in about 5 minutes. The whole Mt. Rushmore thing is totally inappropriate, it might actually drive people AWAY from the product. The ad is totally uninformative. I truthfully think a frontal attack on the big office packages, something along the lines of "Why pay $600 bucks for MS Office when you can get our product which does the same thing for free" or something similar to be much more effective. Shoot, even those AWFUL Sprite commercials are better than this. I would have to say tha this ad is one of the biggest disappointements the open source community has delivered in a while

Re:Is it

[NitsujTPU]

No. OO.O doesn't have a lot of the things that FireFox had in place when they did this.

People forget a lot about FireFox. For one, everyone, 10 years ago, was using Netscape... which begat Mozilla... which begat FireFox.

People are comparing this to FireFox, because FireFox has a lot of support. People view FireFox as an open source victory. There's a lot different about FireFox though. For one, it was competing against IE, which wasn't as feature-rich and didn't work as well (sorry MS). Compare to MS Office, which OO.O actually has a tough time competing against (Yes, let the flamewar begin. There's nothing like 1000 posts saying, "but I don't use those features!").

Anyway, by the time FireFox was dumping out newspaper ads, IT pros were already recommending their users install it rather than IE, and people were listening. I don't think that that is remotely true of OO.O.

Also, the ad isn't going to resonate with anybody. 99.95% of the population doesn't believe that all software needs to be free, and certainly even less understand what that means, since most people who discuss the matter and clamor to the call don't actually understand what it means.

The ad just isn't going to work on the general public, and it's too soon, there isn't the grassroots support for it. They should wait a year or two until they have their own head of steam, and don't have to ride FireFox's coattails.

Re:Is it

[boingo82]

What are you talking about? As a former graphic artist at a newspaper, I know as well as anyone that Helvetica 55 roman is where it's at!
All that ad needs is a few gradients, 1pt boxes around all the text, and some drop-shadows, and it's ready to go!

Re:Is it

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Not only that, but the claims in the ad are dubious and subjective at best, if not outright untrue. For a start, I'd be expecting a call from Microsoft's legal team, followed by several others, over the claim to be the "world's best" at all those things.

If they run that ad, then unfortunately I think it will have only one overwhelming effect: it will convince serious businesspeople everywhere that open source software is from amateurish wannabe land, and shouldn't be touched with a bargepole.

Re:Is it

[LouisZepher]

Indeed. How about this? A chalkboard with two basic addition-style columns. In the first, list what MS Office can do, in the other, list in similar order everything OpenOffice does. At the bottom of each column, where the answer would go in a problem, list the price ($600 vs Free). Then, in an area outside the frame of the chalkboard, simply say "Do the math" or something...

Re:Is it

[jaseparlo]

Some things that should not be in the ad:

* Performance metrics V MS Office (Even more so in the PPC Mac version!)
* Comparison of Clipart and Wordart features (My kids won't use OOo cos it has none)
* Cost/Benefit in switching from a version of Office that people/companies already own

As far as I can see, the difference between Firefox and OOo is that FF was a distinctly superior product, that filled a gap left by the poor features, security and function of IE. OOo on the other hand fills the same niche as MS Office, but is free. Both of them are massive bloated feature rich monsters, that 95% of people use about 5% of.

Sure, if you don't have any kind of Office software you might try OOo before forking for Office, but if you already own a copy of Office, the time taken to learn new menus and workflow isn't worth switching. Likewise if you are just gonna pirate Office then it's easier to get what you'll be using at work or school than learn something new.

Corporate environments ditto, retraining office drones to accept that a function is in a different spot, rolling out new software etc, isn't worth the time cost of switching from the Office 2000 install that was paid for once and has served well for 5 years. Likewise if you have MS licensing, it's probably all bundled with your OS licensing anyway. This may be different when the next version of Office comes out though, for orgs that will be upgrading at that point the tabbed menu structure in the new Office will mean drone retraining anyway.

I'm not pro MS by any stretch, but I have to work with it. These are arguments compiled from my attempts to live on OpenOffice alone, and from family and friends who I have tried to convince to switch. FF gave easily understood advantages, in security, functionality, but the motive to change Office suite just isn't as compelling

Re:Is it

[omeg]

Yes, they probably are. But PLEASE don't! There are billions of design students, but only a few of them will be able to make anything that looks even remotely professional. The team is much better off searching on until they find someone who can provide them with a real design. Afterall, I can attest to the fact that a lot of design students are also just idiots who only learned how to download Adobe Illustrator last month. They usually don't learn what good design is until years of working in their second or third studio.

If a badly designed ad (with bad humor) ends up in any newspaper, it will make sure that a lot of people will NOT get the product. They will just think of the Mt. Rushmore and the horrible tagline ("They'd download it").

No marketing is infinitely better than bad marketing!

Is it just me...

[jollyroger1210]

Or do the presidents on Mt. Rushmore look especially uneasy?

Well

[warrior_s]

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.

Re:Well

[AhtirTano]

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.

Indeed. I convinced my project to use OpenOffice. I did this purely to satisfy my anti-Microsoft ideology. I convinced the others via cost and demonstrating how well it handled Office files. Two months later, 2/3 of the people were complaining about how bad it was, and the rest were admitting that it wasn't so good. 1/3 of the people had installed Office, knowing that the rest of us would still be able to handle their files. The rest of us continue to use openoffice because of ideology, apathy, or laziness.

Basically, only the spreadsheet has worked to our satisfaction. Text documents are passable, but unpleasant. Presentations are completely inadequate. The migration to Office was mainly triggered by the need for PowerPoint.

I still tell people about OpenOffice, and that we (mostly) use it for our project. But I only recommend it to people who have to do simple things, like short reports or billable hours.

On the other hand, all of us independently decided to use Firefox. And nobody except me realized that there were all those extensions and themes---they chose it because it just worked better "out of the box".

Ugh.

[Stormwatch]

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!

the ad looks like crap

[a.koepke]

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.

Re:the ad looks like crap

[this great guy]

That looks like something put together in MS Paint.

Or Open Office.

Don't hit. Don't hit.

Ad is missing important points...

[RootsLINUX]

- 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 :/

Re:Ad is missing important points...

[nacturation]

doesn't mention that it can run Linux

Maybe in Soviet Russia it can.

Ugh.

[Zadaz]

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.

Ach, mein eyes

[mnemonic_]

That ad looks like total shit. Seriously, it makes the OpenOffice.org project look like a joke. It's insultingly unprofessional design work.

Joe SixPack wont get it

[Freaky Spook]

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.

Who reads Metro?

[apflwr3]

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.

They're not ready yet.

[Cattywampus]

OpenOffice.org is really jumping the gun here, and I think it's gonna backfire pretty hard.

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 being annoyed by it.

And, yeah, ditto the "holy cow, that's an ugly ad" comments, too. It looks very amateurish to me.

Marketing 101

[pipingguy]

Lose the freedom/hippie theme and appeal to wallets. How much does MS office cost these days?

Version 2 by pro designers

[zamyatin]

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.

"Free" is bad

[Comatose51]

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".

Re:Design

[cervo]

The worst thing about the ad is that it does not tell me anything about Open Office except that it is free, runs on windows/mac, and is an office suite. Firefox's Ad mentioned that it was faster/more stable than Internet explorer and it never made unsubstantiated claims of being the "best". Firefox just claimed to be an alternative which is why it worked so well. Furthermore, getting user experiences in the ad was also a good idea to appeal the reader on a personal level. The open office ad is kind of in your face, I am free, I am superior, download me. Personally the ad comes off as very arrogant; if I did not know what open office was I probably would not even bother giving it a try.

What is probably the worst thing of all is that Open Office is both slower and less stable than Microsoft Office. Really I'm not quite sure why anyone would switch other than price. If they advertise themselves now when the product is less than ready for full time, they risk leaving the public in general with the impression that Open Office is inferior to Microsoft Office and always will be. Whereas if they waited until the product was superior to office they would have a better chance at making/keeping converts.

Re:They'd download it

[Petrushka]

It should be "They'd would have downloaded it".

OK, show of hands: who would trust proofreading done by this person?

Yes, the ad is fugly...

[VValdo]

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

That's being unfair to things that ARE horrible.

[ScentCone]

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.

Re:Do it...

[cdomigan]

I just saved $10. It felt good. Please consider making a decent design.

Re:Design

[christian.einfeldt]

Hi Quarters,

Why? Why should I make a mockup for you? I'm your *customer*

Ya know, Doc Searls of the Linux Journal once said that "open source is what happens when the demand side supplies itself." That's quite true, IMHO.

This is a total grassroots effort. Neither Sun Microsystems nor IBM nor Novell or anyone else has "officially" given a dime so far to this OOo ad campaign. YOU own this ad campaign, just like YOU own OOo and every other Free Open Source Software project.

I'm sure you've heard this joke. Microsoft says, "Where do you want to go today?" Apple says, "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FOSS says, "Are you coming, or what?"

So, what are you going to do? Just sit back and complain? Or do something positive and help with this ad campaign?

Re:Do it...

[nacturation]

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?

Does this ad suck by design

[geekwithsoul]

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.

ew

[tbird81]

it looks like the ad was made with openoffice.