Exclusive: Mozilla Secretly Launches A Viral Campaign For Firefox

Great…
Advertisements and campagns are one thing and these campagns “supposed to be viral” are another thing. What is Mozilla trying to do? If firefox was “much ” better than ie, people would have used that. The fact is that ie sucks, and firefox sucks.
There is nothing notable in firefox. I would always recommend Opera rather.

“* 33% less likely to live with others suffering from high cholesterol.
* 24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease.
* 38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.”

uh, that’s not funny…

other
I didn’t think so.

Lovely video!

Firefox is noticeable slower then IE when dealing with sites that have robust Javascript (at least on my site). Anybody else notice / care about that?

Duncan - send me your address - I want to send you the bill for my time for watching that piece of sh**.

Tay would whore himself out for diapers if it paid.

If this is what being a firefox user is like, give me ie7.

Allen
lol.

Nice!
@Robert: Firefox3 will be faster then IE7 even FF2 is faster then IE7 “in my case

I like supporting the underdog, the lunatic fringe, offbeat humor, all that good stuff.

This was a tortuous embarrassment though. I actually wondered whether this was an internal video circulating at Microsoft poking fun at Firefox users. I suspect the IE team isn’t losing any sleep over this campaign.

No IE7 for me, though I do like my Chick Fil-A.

Duncan, sorry, didn’t mean to imply that you found it funny, was just saying that there’s a limit, and just because it’s an attempt to be viral, there’s no need for them to be excessively stupid.

not that great…

other,
sorry, I was agreeing. It’s not funny, well mostly. The song and dance routine by itself would be ok, but the statistics are borderline offensive.

Last time I checked, a browser, be it EI, FireFox or Opera had NOTHING to do with content… put another way, all browsers are boring as hell UNTIL you go on the internet with them to actually see a web site. I don’t understand this whole argument and to say the video sucks is an understatement. The only thing I see of viral potential in all this is people realizing how bloated firefox has become with each successive build.

Jon
http://buzvia.com - Share Influence

Wow, I really wish the benefit song joke would just die. I felt that way a few months back when My Name Is Earl tried the gag and I feel more strongly about it now. This kind of parody was last funny in 1988.

OMG! Cancer is teh funny!

i just got this release for tay - damn he really will pimp diapers!

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – January 7, 2007 – Tay Zonday and Waterfall Mobile announced today the successful launch of Zonday’s direct-to-consumer mobile community powered by Waterfall Mobile’s Msgme platform. Zonday’s fans can text TAY to 67463 to join for free and then purchase official Chocolate Rain and Internet Dream ringtones, learn and interact with Tay himself, and even purchase Zonday wallpapers. Fans can also visit http://www.tayzonday.com or http://www.myspace.com/tayzonday to sign up as well as preview the ringtones.

Nominated this year for “Favorite User-Generated Video” for the People’s Choice Awards, Zonday is a bona fide YouTube phenomenon. One of only 100 users who belong to the YouTube partner program, his videos have generated over 15 million views. His unique voice is frequently compared to James Earl Jones, Barry White, Paul Robeson and Brad Roberts.

“Tay is a shining example of how the web can create unprecedented relationships between artists and fans by exposing music to a huge audience,” said Daman Bahner, Zonday’s personal manager. “With Waterfall’s Msgme platform, we extended our reach into the mobile channel. In minutes, we developed and deployed our mobile strategy enhancing the fan’s ability to engage with Tay and his music while also creating significant revenue opportunities.”

“Waterfall’s technology empowers any media owner to launch a mobile campaign without any infrastructure or training,” said Matt Silk, Executive Vice President of Waterfall Mobile. “With Msgme, the mobile channel joins the Internet as a marketing channel for everyone regardless of whether you are a Fortune 500 brand, start up or individual with an innovative property.”

Zonday will be performing this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and has been featured in print media such as The Los Angeles Times, The Toronto Star, Yahoo! News, E! Online, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune’s Redeye, The Minneapolis Star Tribune and PEOPLE Magazine. His television appearances include VH1’s “Best Week Ever,” G4TV’s “Attack Of The Show,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” CNN’s “Saturday Newsroom” and CW’s “Online Nation.” His television features include NBC’s “Last Call with Carson Daly” and ABC’s “I-Caught.” He has interviewed with radio’s “The Opie & Anthony Show,” “The Playboy Morning Radio Show,” and dozens of other regional broadcasts in the United States, Europe and the Pacific.

horrible, firefox is now officially a mess

Thats Cool
Regards,
Muddabir
http://www.xperts.net.pk

* 21% less likely to be a sales representative or agent at their current place of business.

This is the most hilariously ironic statistic in there.

I’d also think that maybe they need to work on making Firefox crash less often and use less memory, instead of making stupid videos. I love Firefox, but it’s getting worse with every release, and pretty much the only reasons I haven’t jumped ship are simple laziness, and Firebug.

This seems loosely based on the “We are the World” concept, highlighting exactly why this internet generation will sit idly watching each other watch 2girls1cup while the world gets flushed down the toilet.

Pathetic.

Tay Zonday is the definition of luck meeting opportunity… he has a great voice, exceptionally talented and thanks to the internet - a worldwide audience without costing him a dime in marketing nor payola. He is viral videos at its best… this firefox video is viral videos at their worst. If you have to call your video “viral”, then it isn’t “viral” anymore but a wannabe.

Jon
http://buzvia.com - Share Influence

Firefox is a piece of crap. Ditto for IE (BIGGER piece of…)

Nuff said.

Its creating buzz so its working…I quite like it.

I Love firefox…..

Oh god, I love firefox, and I know nobody who uses IE7

but this is LAME!!!!

No matter how viral it gets, even if it beats the numa guy or brookers, but for gods sake, don’t embarras us firefox fans like this!

ASA DOTZLER, WHERE ARE YOU TO CLEAN THIS MESS!!!

“secret viral”… that makes a lot of sense.

If this wasn’t posted up on TC (likely paid for), who would know/care about it?

What an embarrassment! MS could not have done a better job themselves to create such brand-damaging collateral. Yikes!

If everyone here is so down on Firefox and Explorer, what alternatives might you offer? Besides Opera, which someone mentioned above…? Help a skater out.

So, videos are fun, but code talks. I have been a firefox user for years, but now I just assume that at some point in the next few days I will have to force it to quit and hope that when it “resumes” my session it will have the tabs I want. On a Mac.
Fix Firefox. Then brag.
Disclosure: yes, I was on the IE4 team. But that was a long time ago, baby. The keyboard I’m typing on says “Macbook.”

Not my kind. I think I’ll pass.

some of the statistics are in bad taste.

if mozilla firefox users are less likely to live with someone with breast cancer, it’s probably because they are mostly men, and are also NOT getting any.

that’s the only thing i find funny about the breast cancer statistic mozilla is using in its viral campaign.

Dear skater,

it’s not about a better option, it’s about the sadness that all the options suck.

I could see this making people stick with IE, Maxthon, or Opera. It’s mildly funny but a bit too awkward (and maybe condescending to some). Tay Zonday was the only redeeming one in the video. They would’ve been much better off paying him alone to create a humorous song/video about Firefox.

Mozilla should fix the insane memory bloating of FF before asking people to “rise up.”

The clip from the Craig Ferguson show is actually kind of funny.

At least CBS is getting some free advertising.

thank you to all the people pointing out the memory issues

god knows how many forums and blog comments around the interwebs have focused on this issue, and yet they spend money on marketing this flawed product. FIX THE MEMORY LEAKS DAMMIT.

I’m not big on these comments, but this has really angered me.

“* 33% less likely to live with others suffering from high cholesterol.
* 24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease.
* 38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.”

That is just so carelessly un-funny… and not in any way relevant to anything which firefox is supposed to represent.

Mozilla, if you read this, you just lost a user. I hear Safari is faster anyway.

r.e. questions about memory - Mozilla has been working on memory use for a very long time. Firefox 3 (in Beta2 now) includes a large number of improvements to memory usage. Some details about this and memory work dating back to 2001 or so:

http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11.....about-you/

Really bad tate.

I agree - ‘everything sucks’. Firefox, Opera, IE - all of them. That’s why I’m going to stop using all these free programs that provide me with so much entertainment and go and do something that doesn’t suck like…. hang on have to use my browser to find something.

There is only one thing worse than releasing an arse-clenchingly awful ‘viral’ campaign so bad it that people find out about it through the press, and that is not releasing an arse… no, hang on.

Borderline offensive.

“23% less likely to have cancer.” - in the big long list.

That just isn’t funny.

As a Firefox user who *has* cancer, I’m less than amused.

And how the hell are boredom and cancer even remotely connected?

wtf @ disease jokes?

Come on, mozilla… ever since they set up a for-profit

…they’ve gone downhill.

yay for finishing comments.

This is Paul Kim, VP of marketing for Mozilla. I want to apologize to anyone who was upset or offended by some of the stats on the not yet final website for this campaign. The list Techcrunch referenced was posted without a final review by Mozilla and wasn’t intended to be published as is. We’re working right now to correct this on the site, which goes live in a final form later today.

Ditto on the “statistics in poor taste” comments.

What is this, reverse-effect marketing?

Paul, these are just a few of the “facts” I copied from the live version of http://www.fightagainstboredom.org/

23% less likely to have cancer.
25% less likely to have breast cancer.
15% less likely to have cancer.
20% less likely to live with others suffering from cancer.
17% less likely to live with others suffering from cancer.

I stopped here; there might be even more. If it wasn’t intended to be published, why is it posted on the site?

Zachary: There is no way we would have gone live with a site that mocks cancer victims if there had been a review of these stats beforehand. Something went seriously wrong with our content development process, and I’m working to clean this up now. The site is up now for testing purposes, but should have been kept behind password authentication until we were ready to open it up. Regardless of these issues on our end, the main thing is to say that I take responsibility for the situation, and again, apologize to anyone who was upset by this.

secretly? they told you did’nt they

Paul,
Fine, apology taken. So please remove the bad taste quotes ASAP! Who could even thought about those!

Paul, your job, if you choose to accept it, is to make a small donation to the our bladder cancer awareness site (http://blcwebcafe.org/):

http://tinyurl.com/2f2yzt

I’m still a happy Firefox user.

Thanks.

Zach

They should relaunch 1.5 because the new versions 2.0 and 3.0 are not as good. Less time marketing and more time reverting checkins.

For being a viral video, it doesn’t seem that viral at all. Actually, it kind of sucks. The best viral videos are spoofs of other big ad campaigns. It would have been kind of funny if firefox launched a “truth” campaign against explorer similar to the tobacco one on tv.

Paul, throw 100 quid at Macmillan Cancer Care and I’ll keep using firefox and thunderbird.

Decent idea, terrible execution. The cancer comment doesn’t fly.

I f***in’ hate this campaign. It is more pretentious/obnoxious than the get a mac ads. What’s this campaign supposed to tell us? That we were soul-less, boring people that are more likely to suffer all the bad things in life before we used firefox ?

it’s true, firefox has become a part of me, very much like an extension of me on the internet, but firefox didn’t make me who I am, I use firefox as a consequence of who I am

Dear Mozilla - before this I questioned your intentions, but now I question your ethics.

Mr. Kim - while your crisis management in this situation might be spot on, this isn’t a content development process issue — this is a simple morals and decency issue.

From your own website (http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/):

“We are helping make the Internet a place…that generates not only economic value, but also civic and social value.”

Sounds to me like economic value (for yourselves) is really the only goal for Mozilla at this point…

http://channel9.msdn.com/showp.....tid=367207

watch and learn

aiming for an ipo, brains go dead

Get over yourselves, folks!
Paul’s explained what went wrong and apologised.

When was the last time Microsoft said sorry for IE?

Maybe I’ve got a tougher skin but I thought the video was hilarious.

I hate it. It´s not funny at all, couldn´t finish it and gave me a headache.

You guys need to lighten up….I’m a cancer survivor and things like this don’t bother me.

Firefox rules.

Is this just me or is it a little lame.

This is a massive cock-up Paul. Frankly the excuse doesn’t even make sense - the content was written by someone, and someone who appears to have been working on behalf of Mozilla. Saying that it was not meant to be “publicly available” makes it seem as if these comments are only acceptable as a private joke at Mozilla. In reality they got posted to the site, so this is totally unacceptable.

Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion, and if something like this came from Microsoft you’d go absolutely crazy.

Tasteless, whether it was supposed to be live or not.

The message I get is that only young, healthy people use Firefox. If you’re old or unlucky enough to have cancer (either personally or in your family), then you should just toddle off and die, you’re not cool enough to use Firefox.

Seriously, Mozilla, grow the **** up. That was about the most pathetic attempt at humor I’ve seen in a long, long time.

You don’t want accountants or sales & marketing professionals to use Firefox? People who are ‘boring’?

Half the population is more boring than average. Secretly, they all sit home wishing they were more like those cool young people in San Francisco. Like the 50% of America that voted for Bush.

Does anyone know how to send a news tip to TC? I’m not trying to promote my own company, it’s some potentially newsworthy info about another company. The “contact” form seems to be only for submitting your own company for review.

A little additional advice for Paul: It might be time to fire the 24-year olds in your marketing department and hire some people who have a little more experience in producing content that’s funny without being offensive.

I hear Jay Leno’s writers are available…..

One more thing,

Underdogs are loved cuz they don’t offend those on top while they fight them, they just do a better job and people loves them.

Don’t waste your time using unethical marketing tactics like M$, we hate them because of that, regardless of how good or bad their products are.

Don’t fvck with opera or safari, let them live and grow together.

We love you guys, just do the right thing…

Viral my a**! Don’t get my wrong. I use Firefox, I can’t live without it, especially the add-ons. But the video sux, the “statistics” are lame and not funny, AT ALL. If it’s up to me, I’ll fire the marketing team behind this as soon as you can say CRAP.

http://www.TheFuckSong.com - Web 2.0 Stress-Relief

Give me a break people. The guy apologized, it sucks, oh well.

People make insensitive and non-PC jokes behind the scenes all the time, don’t act like you haven’t. This is obviously has to do with the people content-creation or copywriting and shame on then for making it live, hoping people wouldn’t discover it yet, but cut them some slack.

What in the hell where they thinking? This is the worst thing to hit the net in a long, long time.

Guys, I’m a Web 2.0 developer. I can attest to the fact that FF 2 is much better than IE7 in terms of 1. performance for Javascript-heavy websites, and 2. Memory consumption. IE7 is plagued with multiple memory leak problems. Ask any serious web developer and they will agree with me. IE7 is just an inferior browser. Period.

Duncan, the “Truth About Mozilla” website isn’t a fake blog. It’s a real critique of Mozilla’s practices. Some people feel this has become necessary since the formation of a for-profit organization. Just because Mozilla is Open Source doesn’t mean everything it does is automatically rosy. This video is just one example.

What in effing hell were they thinking?

That was bloody dreadful!!!

I can’t believe they actually sang that pisser of song through to completion. Honestly, I thought they would have paid us for out time with some great punchline at the end to show it was a joke.

I’m seriously pissed off that I watched that thing all the way through.

Just a horrendous, absolutely atrocious piece of video! They need to publicly apologize to Firefox users for producing that worthless piece of three minutes of life stolen from so many of us.

“When was the last time Microsoft said sorry for IE?”

Uh, MS/IE never went and made horribly offensive “viral” jokes. Also, using FF3 right now, the memory leaks are less frequent, but far from solved, and the performance hogging issues charge on.

I support using Firefox, and encourage my clients to use it wherever possible. I did notice, however, that uploading 25 MB to YouSendIt went infinitely long (>23 hours projected; halted) in FF, while an attempt at the same time of day in IE took the expected 7 minutes.
FF gets viral marketing anyway, from users — that’s pretty much what viral marketing was, before the marketers got hold of it. This ad campaign sucks, but I would not have seen it except for The Reg’s story.

So Firefox made a video they think is funny and posted it. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. For people who are offended - grow up, get some thicker skin, and quit being such a puss. I personally think the song portion sucked, but the statistics thing was a little funny, though it doesn’t bother me one way or the other. People have become way too sensitive.

The only was they can redeem themselves is with a true and funny viral campaign. They could do so many cool stuff without offending anyone!

just in - Mozilla pulls offensive viral campaign - http://tinyurl.com/2zk2m3

* 24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease.
* 66% more likely to have viewed or listened to audio or video about politics or public affairs news within the last 30 day.
* 89% more likely to have purchased database software for work in the last year.
* 38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.

Bad taste or not the stats could be true, since using Firefox means you have to have the initiative to go out there and look for alternatives to the status quo, which is the IE that’s shipped out in every Windows pc on earth.

Personal volition doesn’t come easy, and sticking with IE that keeps crashing every 30 minutes represent sloth, a trait common to couch potatoes, and those addicted to greasy foods.

My wife was a Firefox user who died of cancer. It is hard to imagine the mind who would consider this funny.

I’m just wondering if everyone is asleep here, or am I getting too old for the public, but it’s direct mock up of Band Aid I and II Video…

And boy, Band Aid was bad (”tuneless” in the phrasing of Morrissey), but this is even worse… even for a parody.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jEnTSQStGE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDhnIWMBrc0

People of Mozilla are crazy…

“sticking with IE that keeps crashing every 30 minutes represent sloth, a trait common to couch potatoes, and those addicted to greasy foods.”

…or it means not being hip to firefox. I doubt my grandmaw’s made the switch. She also doesn’t have an iPod, and has no interest in SF.

This thread makes me want to switch to IE7.

what a load of bollocks. i could never believe that viral marketers were capable of making this much crap. if you wanna trash up a brand and make it work in your favor, this is definitely not the way. “38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer” how on the palnet of earth this can be linked to using a particular software???????
right now you need to do some damage control, you just bashed up your own brand. i will be more than happy to give you some info on contact details of good crisis managers and PR experts, you guys get yourselves some expert help and you may even wanna consider going back to business school.
now i have a different definition of a publicity nightmare.

Why not focus on what *really* separates FF from IE instead of taking a risk on an advert that is so obviously going to offend and that does nothing to educate users about the merits of using FF but instead spreads a lame attempt to build a brand-image?

What’s more important to you- Brand Quality or Product Quality? This type of ad (offensiveness aside) says “our brand identity is the most important thing about our product” and companies generally only revert to that type of campaign when there’s really nothing to differentiate them from the other products on the market.. But Firefox actually IS a better product (I trust you agree) so start selling it based on THAT fact.
All the cool people already use firefox, you don’t need to advertise to them.

You need a nice sheeple-friendly advert with fluttering birds and laughing children and calming music that explains in comforting tones why firefox is better, faster, more secure and offers a smoother web experience. Then Mom and Pop will want it. Then you’ve got your market share.