General marketing
Superbowl ad: 3 million reasons why Mozilla shouldn’t run one
(Note: This is a response to Ken’s blog post)
The Super Bowl is just a few days away. People from around the country will be settling into their seats to watch the commercials as much as the game itself. In honor of the big game, Ken Kovash and I thought it would be fun to have a blog debate about the following question:
Should Mozilla advertise Firefox on the Super Bowl?
Ken consistently has fantastic insights into the world of Mozilla metrics (you should read his blog regularly if you don’t already), and most of the time I agree with his analysis. But not this time.
First, some facts, figures, and assumptions:
- According to Nielsen, 2008 Super Bowl advertisers saw a 24 percent jump in Web traffic the day after the game.
- The approximate cost of a spot in this year’s game is $3 million (Advertising Age).
- With two smaller media market teams in this year’s contest (Phoenix and Pittsburgh), it’s likely that ratings will be about the same, or perhaps lower than last year’s New York-New England matchup.
- Running a Super Bowl ad would mean very little marketing budget left for the remainder of the year for Mozilla.
Ken was kind enough to send me his top reasons in favor of doing a Super Bowl Ad. My counter-points follow below:
Ken’s point #1: “Before all else, any effort and decision making around a Super Bowl commercial would be community enabled and driven by the Mozilla community. In other words, something similar in spirit to the NYTimes ad for the Firefox 1 launch.”
Mozilla is critically dependent on its community in order to be successful, for both product development and marketing. But the central question is not whether the Mozilla community would be involved (definitely), but should they be? Does a Super Bowl ad “feel” Mozilla, even with community involvement? Unlike Download Day or the NY Times Ad, appearing on the Super Bowl just doesn’t seem to fit our DNA. In these tough economic times, spending millions of dollars on a very “corporate” marketing tactic seems like the very thing that Mozilla doesn’t represent as a public benefit organization dedicated to improving life on the Web.
Ken’s point #2: “Firefox is a mainstream brand (one of the biggest in the world) and would benefit as much as any other brand from a mainstream ad channel. In other words, we’re not Sales Genie with a niche product or service.”
True, the Firefox brand is becoming much more mainstream (market share at 20% and growing, a top 100 web ranking, etc.). In fact, Firefox is growing even faster overseas. Which makes advertising on the Super Bowl curious. As a very US-centric event, there’s little reason to spend nearly an entire year’s marketing budget on something that so few current and potential new Firefox users will see. Plus, just because other big brands are doing it doesn’t make it right for your brand.
Ken’s Point #3: The story of the process behind our ad and of our community decision to have an ad would generate more than $10 million in press. Go Daddy generated this return during a couple recent years.
It seems that over the last few years, the only way to generate press from your Super Bowl Ad is to show scantily clad women or do something incredibly controversial. A recent ad for PETA has received the most buzz heading into this year’s game because of sexually charged behavior around vegetables (seriously, I am not making this up). Go-Daddy’s CEO wrote an interesting editorial recently. Would Mozilla be comfortable taking this position? “Competing” with the Go-Daddys and PETAs of the world to generate this type of “press” seems like a bad idea. Simply running user-generated or community sponsored commercials is unoriginal and likely wouldn’t provide any additional press.
Ken’s Point #4: Production costs would be zero. We’d be able to use an already produced ad from Firefox Flicks.
Firefox Flicks was an outstanding program — it involved the Mozilla community, it was incredibly original, and the press that resulted was outstanding. When using user-generated content first started appearing on TV, it was a very novel, low cost approach and netted advertisers a good deal of buzz. We were one of the first organizations to do this. But I’m afraid that this strategy has jumped the shark. You need to be outrageous to generate any additional buzz, good or bad (see point above).
Ken’s Point #5:Retention marketing has consistently been a challenge for Mozilla. There are limited opportunities of this size and scale for us to remind existing users that they have a choice beyond the blue e.
Retention marketing is indeed a challenge. However, the linkages between Firefox and improved retention by spending an entire year’s marketing budget on 60 30 seconds of TV is misguided. To retain a user (or buyer), an organization needs to consistently engage with them over time. Creating a better product, having excellent customer service – those are ways to retain users and customers in an enduring way. Not a one-shot TV ad.
More than a retention tactic, a Super Bowl Ad is an acquisition play — for Mozilla it would have to increase the number of downloads of Firefox and ultimately the number of active users. In other words, would running a Super Bowl Ad provide sufficient return for Mozilla?
Based on the information above via Nielsen, let’s assume that traffic to the Mozilla website the day after this Sunday increases 24%. Currently, Firefox is downloaded about 1.2 million times per day (amazing, even without a Super Bowl ad!). Let’s now assume that the entire 1.2 million downloads come from the Mozilla website and that all of the 24% increase in traffic results in a download (in reality, it would be a fraction of this 24%). The net number of new downloads that first day would be about 300,000. A commercial slot costs about $3 million (excluding production costs). So our cost per download would be, at first glance, a reasonable $10. But when you consider that our search marketing programs are 100x more efficient at about $0.10, spending $10 seems pretty pricey.
Enjoy the commercials!
Update: Justin Scott has joined the debate. He makes some interesting points in favor of a Super Bowl Ad. What do you think?
Still the best super bowl ad
Discussion
12 comments for “Superbowl ad: 3 million reasons why Mozilla shouldn’t run one”
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reasons for a community base superbowl ad
-a two page nytimes ad was corporate, until we changed the game.
-to improve the web need to influence. to influence we need marketshare and mindshare. superbowl ads once were about trying to capture that as your graphic shows. lets do something to return that focus.
-sure it’s US centric. so was the nytimes. to me that’s not a reason to do it.
-one less ad with scantily clad women. sounds like a reason to do it.
-time to change the game. the apple ad sent a message. it could have been interpeted as outrageous for its time. outragous+no msg=bad
outragous or engious+message=good. lets do something that does something good and interesting and get others doing it as well. “community base/crowd source ads” were the big news last year, we miss an opportunity to lead there.
-only 30 seconds.
-blowing the budget is not an option. If the community thinks this can have impact the community will fund it. If they don’t, they won’t. The task is one of being a catalyst to make this happen if there is interest.
-the last few paragraphs miss several points. the nytimes ad was not a single event, and the superbowl ad can’t be either if it is to be successful. The story about the nytimes ad was the thousands or tens of thousands of press articles that referenced the power of the community that created that ad. Any superbowl ad needs to follow that forumula. How many stories have you read about superbowal ads in the last few days. With a Firefox ad we tap into those stories automatically, then we also have the ability to tap into stories way past the “event” just like with the nytimes ad.
-as a lot of the research points out, its really not any single event that seems to drive downloads to sustained new levels. its the expansion of our user base spreading buy word of mouth and its the constant increase in press interest and stories about what we are doing, and the impact we are having.
-can you create some impact?
What Chofmann said!
It’s just like the NYT thing. We engaged once (which is, like you say, a no-no in conventional advertizing), but the press coverage was the actual thing we wanted to happen, which brought all the *visibility* we needed.
Now I agree, with you on several points:
* Does this fit with our DNA? Not so sure.
* $3M? OMG! There is nothing left for the rest of the world in terms of marketing budget.
Nah, superbowl ad feels wrong to me. Probably #1 reason is I’m not US American and I don’t care about spectator sports. Besides it’s a one time affair, hit and run and very expensive. Also I have some doubts whether it would be worth it. Wouldn’t the ad possibly just drown between the scantily clad women and other big budget productions? “Now thy’re advertising for a browser, yawn. Very interesting.” (Hey, what’s wrong with scantily clad women anyway? I think I would support it if the ad would go completely and obviously overboard with scantily clad (and nerdy) girls all using Firefox…)
Maybe Mozilla should do what Hollywood did in starting in the Forties. Invest in some high-profile product placement. Make using Firefox as cool as smoking was then. The female heroine pushing away her know-nothing companion who starts opening IE, yelling: “Are you nuts!? I don’t need my machine infested with viruses, idiot! Ah, men!” Then she starts Firefox and does all the incredible things we Firefox users do everyday
For 3 million you could do a lot of this sort. It would be crazy.
It would go on to eternity and beyond on video and TV broadcasts. I’d love to see that!
That’s global retention marketing. I don’t believe I wrote this but it could actually work.
-I’m not going to try and argue that the superbowl isn’t US centric, but it should be noted that its televised and viewed in 230 countries.
-5 years ago 15,000 of the 3 million firefox users opened up their wallets to the tune of about $30 each to make the NYTimes ad happen. What is the size of that community 5 years later? Is it still 15,000, or is it roughly 0.005% of Firefox users, or is it something else? If its grown at the same pace as the number of users it would be around a million.
-A million people tossing in $2, $3, or $5 could make something big happen.
-I’m not sure that just using one of the flicks videos is the right approach. We ought to think about something that communicates something about our values, and what we are trying to achieve, and the impact we are/could have. That was the magic of the apple ad from many years ago. Tough to do, but that is the challenge.
If we followed the example of the New York Times ad, running a Super Bowl ad wouldn’t take anything away from the regular marketing budget since we’d raise donations specifically targeted for the commercial. In 2004 the community was much smaller, but 1/4 of a million dollars was raised in just around 10 days for the ad. In theory we could raise enough donations to do this and that process itself could be a fun activity for the community.
As a community member I’d be pretty profoundly annoyed if Mozilla blew $3m like this. Superbowl ads where the epitome of dotcom bubble insanity, imo. There has got to be a better way to spend that money.
The New York Times ad may have been “US centric” but this newspaper has an international aura of something serious, respectable, credible. I’m sorry to inform you that it’s not at all the case with the super bowl. I can’t see anyone in the rest of the world being excited by this (even after being explained what the super bowl actually is). I certainly wouldn’t be.
The assumption that the global traffic would jump by 24% is also wrong. Only 24% of the traffic coming from the US would. See this article linked on Wikipedia: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/steve_rushin/02/03/rushin0206/
If you wanted something truly global, you could choose the FIFA World Cup finals. Of course it would be an equally bad idea, but maybe it will help you understand why
Let’s say we place enough consecutive people in the stadium so that they can color coordinate to collectively create a massive Firefox logo. Sort of a human crop circle. The message focuses on leveraging an organized crowd (literally), and it isn’t very corporate. Given a similar budget we could probably get a reasonably sized logo, but on the downside contributors would need to watch an entire football game :p
[...] David Rolnitzky has a comprehensive counterpoint here. I actually agree with most of what he says, but if you’re interested in a rebuttal, Justin [...]
Basically throwing money in a SuperBowl commercial would mean Mozilla and the whole community aren’t clever enough to do something different.
Think of whatever Firefox clip you’d like to see (that’s yet another matter), now imagine it stuffed in the middle of high-adrenaline/mind-numbing… branding exercises. Wouldn’t it be like having a child take a shower with the convicts of a State Penitentiary?
Great post Rolo. I tend to agree with most of your points, but also liked some of the comments above… especially Alex’s idea
Hypothetically speaking, we don’t even need to shove our own contributors into the stadium, but simply hand out the cards for people to hold up (coordinated by seat number). Similar to what Michael Jackson did in 1993. Which in my opinion was one of the best half-time performances: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mSqjzdaCYA
PS. The part I’m referring to is about 2 minutes into the video…