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 names writ small — very, very, very small:
Now, it’s not an outstanding ad as far as ads go. And since it ran in a newspaper, it has next to nil staying power (we would have done better to put a Firefox sticker on the dashboard of Dale Jr.’s NASCAR Monte Carlo). But it certainly is a milestone in the history of customer evangelism.
Have you tried Firefox lately? Over 11 million people have so far, because it’s a great product worth talking about.
It may have nil staying power since it’s on paper, but I’ve seen many online articles about the ad, so its legacy will live on.
You make a good point, Schmoppa — the real purpose of the ad was to make a big PR splash.
The thing is, do you think it matters to people who don’t already use Firefox?
Do you use Firefox?
If people read about it from a source that they respect, then I would say yes. My father-in-law sent us an article about Firefox from the Wall Street Journal a couple months ago. I’m not sure if he’s using it. He has a Mac, so he may still be using Safari.
I’ve tried to get my parents to use Firefox on their PC. Even if they don’t take advantage of tabbed browsing and the other great features (not to mention spiffy user-made extensions), at least Firefox is less prone to getting hijacked than IE.
I have been using Firefox since around beta .92.