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December 16, 2004
Firefox ad runs around the world
The now infamous Firefox ad ran in the NY Times today. It's a two-page spread on pages A24 and A25. Over 10,000 names of customer evangelists who donated money to make the ad possible appear in the ad (albeit in extremely small typeface.)
You can see the Mozilla press release and actual ad here. Or buy a commemorative poster of the ad here : )
While the ad design itself is not super remarkable, it's the idea of rallying customers together to support the ad that is rather amazing.
Rob Davis, who drove the ad idea, says they hit their first goal of 2,500 donations in 17 hours. In the end, 10,000 individuals, families, and companies donated over $250,000.
German customer evangelists also jumped on the idea. 2,403 people donated $93,000 for an full-page ad (PDF) that appeared in the business section of the Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).
Think this is just warm and fuzzy hype?
Since November 9, over 11 million people have downloaded Firefox. And Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) is losing market share. One report has IE's market share down 5 percentage points since May to 88.9%.
Whether you call this open source marketing or community marketing, it's very effective and more companies and non-profits will be doing it.
Other blogs that reference Firefox ad runs around the world:
» More Firefox Customer Evangelism from metacool
Earlier this year I talked about the remarkable, user-driven Firefox ad campaign. Well, I'm happy to say that today I joined over 10,000 other web browser geeks to run an ad in the New York Times with each of our [Read More]
Firefox has the fix...
I'm a Mac user. I was interested to try Firefox because other Mac browsers don't properly display pages (and some functions) the way they do on a PC. A great example is the TypePad (blog software) interface. I cannot perform many formatting functions on the Mac - they don't work. However, in Firefox - they do.
This week was the first time I tried to search for a specific word on a web page... I was pleasantly surprised at how neat the FIND interface was (at the bottom of the page)... Nice touch. Nice surprise.
Not only is it a better browser, but also it is a better browser!
If you're not talking up Firefox right now you're not hip!
Come on, folks, is this the best we can do?
