Firefox New York Times Ad Hits the Presses 721
Dave writes "The long awaited New York Times ad for Firefox has finally hit the presses. Because of the vast number of donations the ad covered two pages of the newspaper. It's being timed to coincide with 11 million downloads."
Very impressive design... (Score:2, Insightful)
I was a little apprehensive as to how the ad would turn out, but I think the result is not only an eye-catcher, but very classy.
Kudos to the Mozilla team!
Not very good (Score:4, Insightful)
They refer to the people who've downloaded it as "users". While, yes, they are users, I think the majority of the web browsing population doesn't use the term "user" when referring to themselves. Something like "... 10 million people from around the world..." would've sounded less geek-like.
Heck, a lot of people don't even separate the "web browser" as something that is distinct. They think of the web as the Internet, their monitor as their computer, their case as their hard drive, etc.
The ad did focus on the spyware, crashes, etc. which is good -- but, IMHO, they just didn't do it in the "average computer users" tongue.
Re:Not to sound grim.. (Score:3, Insightful)
How ironic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just how exactly are they paying for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not very good (Score:5, Insightful)
That is what I call redundancy !
Re:Not very good (Score:5, Insightful)
People aren't *complete* idiots. Anyone who doesn't understand 'user' probably doesn't understand any of the concepts involved.
It's a self-policing system.
Re:NYT Ad (Score:3, Insightful)
--Which would not exist at all without community enthusiasm and support. These are POSITIVE things. Why do some people have a problem with this?
Your stick is in the mud.
-FL
Re:Not to sound grim.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Hopefully this will only be the beginning (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally have converted at least five people at work and several other friends to Firefox, all of whom have nothing but praise for it. Any web sites that I maintain now say "Designed for use with Firefox" with a link.
Regarding the comments about "Who reads newspapers at this time of year" and so forth, you need to remember that the NYT is reprinted and read all over the world. This is not just a single newspaper in a single city. The NYT is also highly respected (not that it really deserves it), so a lot of people will read it.
The next step IMHO should be USA Today. That too is a globally printed newspaper and usually has a different reader base than NYT.
My only concern in that they might have set a precedence with including names of donors. Let's face it. How many of you who donated did so more (not only, but more) because of the "coolness" factor of having your name printed instead of the core purpose of supporting a great browser?
Re:Cheers! (Score:5, Insightful)
The word "free" is only mentioned once and in tiny, tiny type. If I were reading the paper, and I didn't immediately avoid this ad in the first place, I would probably never see that reference. And, not knowing what Firefox is, I would assume there was a cost attached.
The giant "1.0" is worthless. The audience that this ad is targeting can get nothing useful from this information. They may see it and say "Of course it's 1.0; it's 'introducing'". Or they may see it and say "Firefox is out of beta?", but then this is a waste of advertising space for them, because they're already the wrong demographic. At worst they will see it and say "1.0? My browser is already 6.0", which is the opposite effect.
There's also very little quick information available to differentiate Firefox from the audience's existing browser. There's mention of pop-ups and a lack of crashing, but it's contained in boring testimonials and a tiny little afterthought paragraph that has the smallest text on the page.
Re:Not to sound grim.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Compare apples to apples not apples to pomegranates. Firefox has only been around for roughly 2 years. Go back to when IE came out and look at its performance at the same time period. I'm reasonably certain you would see a similar number of issues.
Considering Firefox has only been out for 2 years the number of issues it has resolved is staggering. Further, the vast majority of issues that users are having (80-90%) revolve around the users machines and not Firefox itself. People don't maintain their machines. They randomly install/uninstall apps and don't bother to do a good clean up.
Add in the amount of spyware infected machines and the issues that come from the infection and it's no wonder people are having problems. I've installed Firefox on 3 machines and I know of someone else who has it installed and not once has there been any issue. I even upgraded from the 0.7 version on two of the machines and installed the 1.0 version on a users machine which did have spyware but once I cleaned the machine I installed Firefox and the user has zero problems.
Re:What if... (Score:1, Insightful)
I disagree.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not very good (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox is free, however. It costs NOTHING, and can be used on platforms with the same cost.
FWIW, I am aware that IE can be run via wine, and that once upon a time that there was a version for MAC OS, but the first is not by design, and the second was purely a product of the browser wars.
IE may not ask for your credit card #, but it does have associated costs. I don't think that Firefox does.
Re:Hopefully this will only be the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cheers! (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cheers! (Score:4, Insightful)
Appropriate. Don't forget, they appealed to people's vanity to raise the money. (And yes, my name's in the ad
Re:Cheers! (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when Jobs came back to Apple, and they launched fullpage ads in the NYT, as well as Time and Newsweek? That wasn't meant to sell computers per se, it was meant to let the corporate world know that Apple was back. I think Mozilla is doing the same thing with this ad.
It appears to be working, judging by the amount of free press [google.com] they're getting from the event.
Re:Cheers! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one of the few instances where justified type would look better. In this case, with a border on the right page, I think it would have looked much better. Then there is the way that the list of names only has a partial last line. This is easy to fix, anyone with experience designing for newspapers could think of several ways.
I assume that there is too much text to have fine enough control over the font size to do it so the easiest solution is probably to duplicate enough names to fill out that last line. Pick a few people who donated the most and it could even be fair (not that anyone would read that many names and recall the duplication).
Re:Cheers! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not to sound grim.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox has had several recent vulnerabilities announced (and, mainly, fixed), most of which have not become widespread exploits.
A high number of security bugs fixed merely means just that: security bugs are being fixed. It doesn't necessarily follow that there were more bugs there to start with; it could be that other products are equally buggy, but this one has been more diligent in fixing bugs.
It's the unfixed bugs that we need to worry about...
Re:Not very good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cheers! (Score:5, Insightful)
The word "free" is only mentioned once and in tiny, tiny type.
There are quite a few marketing negatives that go along with the word "Free," especially for software, such as "lack of quality," "unsupported," and "spyware-laden." The ad gives it the importance it deserves.
The giant "1.0" is worthless.
Not so. It is used pretty well here, actually. First, it establishes that this is a real product. Second, it establishes that it's a new product, which underscores the marketing message of opting away from something stagnant and old for something fresh and new.
There's also very little quick information available to differentiate Firefox from the audience's existing browser. There's mention of pop-ups and a lack of crashing, but it's contained in boring testimonials
Now you're just showing ignorance. Marketing has specific, limited objectives. In this case, it's prompting the set of readers who are sick of IE but don't know about alternatives to get interested and check out the web site. That's all. Cramming the page with browser features does not support the objective. And by the way, "boring" testimonials are highly effective marketing tools.
Re:The ad should highlight security concerns (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cheers! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is brings out one of the greatest aspects of open source...they don't make something 1.0 until it really is a working version. Sure, closed source versions work and are generally higher quality than a non-1.0 open source project, but then they release 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 as if doling out candy on halloween. I don't know where I'm going with this, exactly, but I guess I just get a little peeved that users really will think version 999.0 of some closed source app is so much better than 1.0 of an open one.
Re:Not to sound grim.. (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, older releases of FF/Mozilla had a ActiveX-type system that could popup an "Install Me" box when you visited a web page. When spyware makers started to abuse this, Mozilla simply changed the policy so it was impossible.
But, the only reason they could get away with this is that the feature had so few legitimate users outside of 1 or 2 known websites. If Microsoft did something similar, they would break thousands of legitimate applicaitons (this is where the popularity/installedbase argument comes into play).
Don't get me wrong -- FF did the right thing reacting quickly to Spyware installers, but it was still an after-the-fact reaction to a poorly designed feature.
The old argument about Mozilla was not that it was "Secure by Design", but that it was "A Great Developer Platform". Developer Platform means extendibility means opportunity for hacks/spyware. There's always going to be interesting new applications of the extentions/XUL stuff that Mozilla will have to keep an eye on.
Re:PHEW! (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps they would have done better with many small ads on a number of successive pages. That is what Audi is doing now in the Wall Street Journal, and I'm more aware of their ad than any others.
A vanity move? Or power to the local guy. (Score:5, Insightful)
I paid for my name to be put in the ad. I admit it was purely for personal business reasons. I support and install Firefox all the time for me clients that are constantly bogged down in spyware. Having an NYT ad that will be framed on my wall with my name on it gives this unheard of browser more credibility in the minds of my clients. Gives me some free press as well even if I have to point it out to people.
Re:Cheers! (Score:5, Insightful)
When organisations like Gartner [gartner.com] are selling reports on it then it's an issue businesses are looking, and this ad will raise awareness about Firefox being one part of the solution.
Re:I wonder if M$ will reply... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Higher resolution image? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because their priority was to make sure it was in a format the NYT could use. I note that it was made by Adobe InDesign; extremely unfree software in every sense, but pretty well guaranteed to print correctly. InDesign uses OpenType to a much greater extent than any other DTP app, so it's probably some font issue that's the problem with other PDF apps. Also it's a huge amount of text to have on one page, possibly they're just overflowing -- as just about every non-Adobe implementation is based on GhostScript I think, a common bug would stop them all.
And of course Acrobat Reader is free, in the monetary sense, though I suppose you didn't mean that.
Re:Cheers! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Firefox ad (Score:2, Insightful)
Which one is a waste of money again?
Make extensions easy to find!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
How long before the hackers exploit Firefox? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been using Firefox for several months now and I won't go back to IE. In fact, I configured my firewall to block IE's network access.
does it really matter? (Score:2, Insightful)
they're doing it again. they won the browser war, now they are backing off and letting the mozilla organization pave the way with new browser features. then in time, they'll take their $ and development team, build all those features into a new IE, and shove it back in people's faces, and *poof* other browsers will go away again.
for christ's sake, people on even this site will still put down mac os x, even tho it's laughable to even compare mac os x to windows anymore.
This ad != Your stated purpose... (Score:3, Insightful)
While you are correct that effective marketing indeed has specific, limited objectives (and measureable results) -- this ad is definitely not one designed to prompt users sick of IE to check out the web site.
I say this without seeing a creative brief [adcracker.com] for the ad, but it's purpose appears to simply be to announce the 1.0 release of Firefox, which it does well. The ad is nicely done in that respect.
However, if it is intended to prompt users sick of IE to check out the site/new browser, it is poorly executed for a number of reasons not limited to:
To address some of your points:
Version numbers mean little to most people unless your target audience is current users and your purpose is to let them know a new version exists. But even then you need to carefully qualify that it's in fact a new version or they may the message. As someone already mentioned, with potential new users, you run the risk of people thinking 1.0 < 6.0 = less mature = not as good.
"Free" is a huge catch-phrase that gets results. The trick is to pay it off appropriately. In advertising world, we (usually) look forward to when we can legitimately include the word 'free'
Testimonials are only effective depending on the message, medium and target audience and only when used correctly. In this case they are very appropriate, but executionally are lacking.
Like I said though -- to announce Firefox 1.0 the ad is great (and much nicer better than what I feared it would be). And as I said a previous post [slashdot.org] though, now we need to see followup ads that do meet the objective you outlined.
Re:Cheers! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Higher resolution image? (Score:2, Insightful)
You might have better luck.
Re:Nifty. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's cool that they had enough money for two pages, but it might have been better to have spent the extra money on a different publication.
The NYT is the paper read coast to coast. I'm in the middle of nowhere, and the local Barnes & Nobles has the NYT every day. Subscriptions are nation-wide. If you want to get your name in front of PHBs all over the country, I can't think of a better vehicle other than printing it on paper currency.