Will We Eventually See a Firefox Super Bowl Ad?

Ken Kovash

4 responses

As we’re just a couple days away from the Super Bowl, David Rolnitzky (one of our brilliant marketers) and I wanted to go through the fun exercise of having a point/counterpoint discussion around the possibility of Firefox commercial debuting during a future game.  I’ll outline a few points below in favor of such a possibility, and then respond to David’s well articulated thoughts (coming soon in an update below).

  1. Before all else, any effort and decision making around a Super Bowl commercial would be community enabled and driven by the Mozilla community.  In other words, something similar in spirit to the NYTimes ad for the Firefox 1 launch.
  2. Firefox is a mainstream brand (one of the biggest in the world) and would benefit as much as any other brand from a mainstream ad channel.  In other words, we’re not Sales Genie with a niche product or service.
  3. The story of the process behind our ad and of our community decision to have an ad would generate more than $10 million in press.  Go Daddy generated this return during a couple recent years.
  4. Production costs would be zero.  We’d be able to use an already produced ad from Firefox Flicks.  My personal favorite is Daredevil (below).
  5. Retention marketing has consistently been a challenge for Mozilla.  There are limited opportunities of this size and scale for us to remind existing users that they have a choice beyond the blue e.

Update: David Rolnitzky has a comprehensive counterpoint here.  I actually agree with most of what he says, but if you’re interested in a rebuttal, Justin Scott entered the conversation taking on David’s points and supporting the idea of a Firefox Super Bowl commercial.

4 responses

  1. deb wrote on :

    I would be very curious to know how much support this idea would get. As a community member, I’d be pretty annoyed if Mozilla did this for a whole bunch of reasons, mostly related to there being a whole bunch of less ridiculous ways to spend that much money 🙂

  2. Archaeopteryx wrote on :

    The issue with a TV ad for a not-all day product is that the people actively have to care about acquiring it. Buying a special beer brand is somthing they can do the next time they want to purchase beer.
    If the community wants to fund such a ad, they can do. But there are better ways to search for new users at a cheaper price (i.e. a A4 4 coloured leaflet including printing and sending to a household in Germany will cost max. 23 Euro cent; 0,30 $; if you get more than 3 of 100 people to download, it would be cheaper than the super bowle ad). Hiring people to give people leaflets to passers-by costs here (in East Germany) min. 5 Euro/h. In most other coutries, this will be much cheaper. Just another example: Being mentioned in the newsletter of the top german freemail provider (GMX) costs 10 Euro cent, 18 Euro cent for a single ad mail ( http://united-internet-media.de/uploads/tx_downloadCenter/Mediadaten_GMX.de_0809.pdf ). Has also the advantage that people can directly open getfirefox.com after recognizing the ad.

    About the spot: It’s about a fast, stylish browser and a personal browsing experience. Are that really the subjects people who still abstain from Firefox care about?
    Fast: People will have to really get the experience on first try. Is it still such a huge desire and can we provide it?
    Stylish: Sorry, sounds Mac-ish. Most people also don’t care it, they want to get things done with their browser.
    Personal browsing experience: Not explained in the ad. Give them some examples with adds.

    Btw: What about some prizes for existing Firefox users at a special date after the ad [campaign?], i.e. “if you want to participate, download and provide email address, else simply download.”

  3. Alex Faaborg wrote on :

    Let’s say we place enough consecutive people in the stadium so that they can color coordinate to collectively create a massive Firefox logo. Sort of a human crop circle. The message focuses on leveraging an organized crowd (literally), and it isn’t very corporate. Given a similar budget we could probably get a reasonably sized logo, but on the downside contributors would need to watch an entire football game :p

  4. Dizi izle wrote on :

    I would be very curious to know how much support this idea would get. As a community member, I’d be pretty annoyed if Mozilla did this for a whole bunch of reasons, mostly related to there being a whole bunch of less ridiculous ways to spend that much money 🙂