Viral, viral, viral. First we get a monkey drumming along to Phil Collins, which, it has to be said was pretty cool, but the latest viral to hit the browsers comes from a far more interesting source, and could have far wider reaching consequences from the legal department at Microsoft. Mozilla, the creators of Firefox have begun a (not so subtle) assault on Internet Explorer in their new marketing campaign. The site, The Fight Against Boredom comprises the usual links and such like, but they have also produced a Talk Show clip and Song which is available for download. All well and good, but the controversy is sure to mount with Mozilla’s inclusion of certain statistics based on users lifestyles.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCYuRA1N3tA[/youtube]
For example, a Firefox user is 21% less likely to be a sales representative or agent at their current place of business, 66% more likely to have viewed or listened to audio or video about politics or public affairs news within the last 30 days. The association, by default, is that IE users are more likely to be a rep, or that they do not watch the news, and Microsoft are not going to like it. Firefox has been gaining ground against IE for a long time and this kind of clever marketing has been known to bring in massive amounts of new custom to web browsers before. Furthermore if these statistics are true (and you know that the legal boys at Mozilla have done their work on this one) it’s going to be interesting what response Microsoft will have for this campaign. The ensuing legal battle may provide more publicity than the viral, is this the dawn of a new age of marketing? Provoke the big boys into suing the butts off you for publicity. I can’t see it catching on. Still it makes for good viewing, the songs pretty naff though.
January 9th, 2008 at 1:07 am
I wish Opera would make such a marketing move to get people into their browsers. It’s a good move to use viral marketing to get people to see FF’s stuff.
I think the inference of the statistics that basically FF users are more informed is probably true. I’m not sure that such statistics are of value. Net Savvy users will switch, but the majority will still use IE because it comes with Windows and a lot of people don’t want to switch from what they know.
Should be interesting to see what Microsoft says in response.
January 9th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Microsoft can eat it from my perspective. Firefox is the king of browers. I dont care what computer in the world I am on I will download and use Firefox, you simply canot beat it
January 10th, 2008 at 2:20 am
Fun move from firefox and I bet Microsoft will come with something back, but asides from it being plain fun I doubt it’ll matter anything. Microsoft will simply keep the upper hand as long as IE is shipped within windows anyways because most people just don’t know where to get anything else or don’t even realize that IE is not “the internet” but this weird phenomenon called “a browser”.
February 10th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
I use Firefox because it looks better and it is much more simple than IE