{"id":109,"date":"2006-04-30T14:52:21","date_gmt":"2006-04-30T14:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/2006\/04\/firefox-flicks"},"modified":"2006-06-18T03:30:02","modified_gmt":"2006-06-18T03:30:02","slug":"firefox-flicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/2006\/04\/firefox-flicks","title":{"rendered":"Firefox Flicks Winners"},"content":{"rendered":"

The winners<\/a> of the Firefox Flicks<\/a> contest were announced a few days ago and\r\n\tI must say that, overall, I\u2019m less than impressed with the quality of the submissions\r\nand not entirely thrilled about the selected winners.<\/p>\r\n

I thought Daredevil<\/a> was\r\n\tquite good, but it seems to be missing something. The music was very good\r\n\tand it was very well filmed, but the girl with very strong american accent may\r\n\tnot have the clearest and easiest voice to understand, particularly for non-native\r\n\tEnglish speakers.<\/p>\r\n

It was one of the few submissions that didn\u2019t just use scare tactics by focussing\r\n\ton viruses, spyware and pop-ups, and stayed well clear of the \u201cuse Firefox\r\n\tor your screwed<\/em>\u201d message that was so abundant among the others; but rather thought\r\n\toutside the box and focussed on a lifestyle metaphor.<\/p>\r\n

One thing that it is lacking, however, is that it doesn\u2019t create brand recognition\r\n\tas well as it needs to at this early stage. I feel it needed to say something\r\n\tat the end to help the user understand the metaphor and relate it, and the brand,\r\n\tto the web \u2013 we don\u2019t want people thinking Firefox is just some kind of surfboard.<\/p>\r\n

Wheee!<\/a> was, by far, the most popular of the submissions\u2014it\u2019s funny, childish\r\n\tand creates brand recognition by associating the Firefox logo with something\r\n\tusers are already familiar with: the IE logo, as well as Safari and Netscape.<\/p>\r\n

However, the message that comes across, in not quite so many words, is that\r\n\tother browsers suck<\/em> and I generally don\u2019t agree with such marketing\r\n\ttactics. While that is arguably true of IE\u2014in many respects, it does suck\u2014I\r\n\tdon\u2019t believe that ridiculing your competitors is an honourable marketing strategy\r\n\tand should not be condoned.<\/p>\r\n

As many people mentioned in the comments, it is catchy and a lot of people\r\n\thave been talking about it, which is actually one of the major aims of any advertisement. \r\n\tFor this reason, I do feel it deserves an honourable mention, but because of\r\n\tthe other reasons, I don\u2019t believe it deserved second place.<\/p>\r\n

As for Fox Fever<\/a>, it just screams low\r\n\t\tbudget crap!<\/em> I have no idea how this\r\n\tmanaged to make the top 3, I didn\u2019t even expect it to receive an honourable\r\n\tmention. Like so many others, it also suffers by focussing on viruses, spyware\r\n\tand pop-ups, which I don\u2019t like because it surrounds Firefox with negativity. \r\n\tWhen people think of Firefox, they should think about the positive experience,\r\n\tnot the negatives of using an alternative.<\/p>\r\n

It also creates a false sense of security: Firefox is not flawless, it has\r\n\tits share of security holes and it certainly does not block all pop-ups. \r\n\tEven with all the preferences I\u2019ve changed to prevent as many pop-ups as\r\n\tpossible, a few still make it through and it\u2019s still quite annoying.<\/p>\r\n

This is Hot<\/a> is\r\n\tone that really does deserve an honourable mention, though I really did expect\r\n\tit to be in the top 3. Overall, this ad was fantastic. The concept, the animation,\r\n\tthe positive message it conveys: just brilliant!<\/em><\/p>\r\n

Last, but not least, Give\r\n\t\tMe the Soap<\/a> was cute. Like Daredevil, it too thought\r\n\toutside the box and came up with a beautiful concept. But the ad itself\r\n\tis not suitable for Firefox, it really does create the wrong impression about\r\n\twhat Firefox does and I feel this submission would be more suitable for a\r\n\tprogram like Ad-aware, Spy-bot or perhaps even some AntiVirus software. \r\n\tFirefox does not clean your computer like those programs do, but that is\r\n\tthe message conveyed to the viewer by the soap analogy. I feel this one does\r\n\tdeserve its honourable mention and, rightfully so, did not deserve to win.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Commentary on the winning advertisments in the Firefox Flicks contest.","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}