PKB

On Monday morning, a blogger wrote that Mozilla had secretly launched a viral marketing campaign, which included some objectionable statistics comparing Firefox users to Internet Explorer users.

The blogger linked to a test site for the Firefox “Fight Against Boredom” campaign that was still in active development. The test site was openly accessible without authorization while it was being worked on, which made it look as though we meant it to be live.

If you visited the site on Monday morning before we put up password protection, you saw a placeholder video clip from the Craig Ferguson show, along with an unedited list of about 3,600 stats from Nielsen Online that we hadn’t yet vetted or approved.

There have been several assertions made since then about the Firefox “Fight Against Boredom” campaign that aren’t true:

• We didn’t write, make up or rewrite any of the 3,600 statistics that were on the test site, of which there were 30-40 that were clearly offensive. The statistics came directly from a widely used market research panel called @Plan, a service of Nielsen Online. It’s a large demographic dataset that’s used by marketers and advertisers to make media buying decisions, based on a regular survey of millions of US residents, and it happens to include Firefox usage as one factor you can then pivot the data on.
• We didn’t approve, authorize or request the inclusion of statistics that referenced health conditions. These statistics should never have been included, even on a test site.
• We did not launch this campaign on Monday. I’ve seen it reported that we launched it and then pulled the campaign. This was *not* an official launch.

This week, we spent a lot of time here talking over options for handling the campaign. Yesterday, we decided not to push the Fight Against Boredom site live.

Mainly, this is because there hasn’t been a strong positive response from the Mozilla community to the video that is the centerpiece of the campaign. The video’s still up on YouTube, and we’ll keep it up there. But we don’t plan to spend any more time on this campaign as it’s clear that people aren’t inspired by the video. We’ve learned what we needed to and we will move on to try new things.

Some background
The “Fight Against Boredom” campaign was part of an overall push we started in the fall of 2007 to improve Firefox retention. As part of this, we scoped out an online marketing campaign that focused on reconnecting with existing Firefox users and encouraging them to share a video with their friends. The video would lead to a web site with a brief list of actual statistics about Firefox users.

We’ve done several marketing campaigns over the past couple of years and with each one, we’ve learned more about how useful the different kinds of things we can do to spread Firefox are. I believe it’s part of the charter of the work we do for Mozilla as marketers to try our hand, to learn, and to share that knowledge to help spread Firefox. We will keep on trying new things, because that in the end is how we’ll achieve meaningful results that help Mozilla.

Big thanks to the Mozilla community for your invaluable part in keeping us honest, open and connected. Our shared commitment to keeping the Web healthy and open for people is the ultimate reason why we’re all here in the first place and we won’t lose sight of this goal.

* For anyone who’s interested, here are links to screenshots of the site as it was intended to be, the song lyrics and the video itself: