Firefox Community Underwrites New York Times Ad

Spread Firefox reports that it ran a two-page ad in today's New York Times under written by 50,000 customer evangelists.  The ad features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation's fundraising campaign to support last month's launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser. More information in this press release. This is a milestone event for community marketing that all marketers should pay attention to. We are no longer the only ones who control the message - it's the consumers too.

Comments

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

I applaud the moxie of Firefox supporters. But I think the Firefox community has been hoodwinked by the so-called power of mass advertising.

10,000,000+ downloads in a month is a STAGGERING number. Even more impressive is the fact that it was achieved without mass advertising. Instead, it was achieved organically through impassioned supporters sharing their fervor for Firefox and through garnering significant free media attention due to the remarkable nature of the open-source browser.

Why go traditional now when going untraditional has put Firefox on the map … why?

The good thing about a newspaper ad that has a ‘download call-to-action’ is that measuring results is easy. So, we shall see if going traditional pays off for Firefox.

[Rafael Ebron]

Hi John,
There's more "traditional" aspects of marketing surrounding Firefox and products at Mozilla than what you see. We couldn't possibly do this open-source marketing without having a good foundation in some of those traditional aspects of marketing/marketing strategy.

While the ad itself you could call "traditional" the way it was completed was certainly not traditional. There's a handful of people who are paid employees at the Foundation yet it feels like there's thousands of us (and in a way there is). There is no way we could've pulled this off "traditionally".
--
Thanks for the post Steve. You're on top of the game as always.

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Okay ... you untraditionally did the traditional. That doesn't change the fact that you did the traditional. And ain't nuthin' more traditional in marketing than placing an ad in the NY Times.

[E.F. Fonkstra]

My guess is that the innovators and even the early adaptors are already involved in the whole process. They have created this campaign!

So to reach the early and maybe the late majority, going "traditional" is actually "solid thinking", simply because they are not that innovative as the innovators and early adaptors in this matter...