[Design-team] New year, new advertising campaign?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

2011/2/20 María Leandro <tatica at fedoraproject.org>:
> Hola people!
>
> As several of you may know, today I made a couple of posters to fill a
> ticket asking for 4 foundations artwork. After receive some complains
> (really few, but we as Fedora listen to everyone) about the message that we
> are sending I think that is a good idea to have a small (but intense) thread
> about "what" we can do to have a more powerful and -clear- message that we
> can use this new year.
>
> Mo and Fab where chatting about how impressive are marketing ads from
> companies like Apple and others, and they also talk about what they show as
> product.
>
> I think that is a good idea to try to come up with a solid marketing
> strategy this year, not only to increase our consolidation as
> artwork/Marketing team; but also to help us recruit not only more users, but
> also more contributors. We want users to choose fedora because "what we are
> and what we do", not because we are winning money. Even so, we want more
> people to know about foss benefits.
>
> Reading just a little, there are several list with the best campaigns [1],
> but the ones I found interesting were:
>
> * McDonald's, "You deserve a break today", Needham, Harper & Steers, 1971
> * U.S. Army, "Be all that you can be", N.W. Ayer & Son, 1981
> * Saturn, "A different kind of company, A different kind of car.", Hal Riney
> & Partners, 1989
> * Polaroid, "It's so simple", Doyle Dane Bernbach, 1977

Another thing about such phrases is that they are long term. Once they
are "set" they become very hard to change. The US Army changed in the
2000's and found that "An Army of One" did not have the sticking power
or message that "Be all that you can be" had. Saturn tried changing
late but found it lost its original customers and did not gain new
ones. McDonalds may have other ones now and then but even today ads
will show up with "You deserve a break today."

> Now, What made me focus on this ones? They are worldwide known. Being a
> non_en speaker (you can know by my terrible english) We should be thinking
> in an _easy, short and consistent between languages_ slogan that defines
> Fedora.
>
> Also, as artwork team i think is not a bad idea to use some ideas to take
> advantage and to try out a strong campaign this year (probably will take us
> a couple of months to develop it and put it in production a couple more of
> months) to recruit those "already new users" and turn them into real
> contributors. One of the problems I see (don't know if is only LATAM or if
> this is happening in other regions) is that people come to events to know
> about $distro , install their pc's, and become users; considering them as a
> 100% of new candidates, only a 20-30% become contributors, and another 5-10%
> quit after their 1st year.

That is usual for most volunteer organizations. One of the issues that
I think we need to be aware of and remember is that the ratio of
contributors to users will always be small and the number who are long
term contributors are even smaller. I don't think even wikipedia has
figured out how to beat that (skipping all the original hype). [One of
my big burnouts in the old days was thinking that somehow we would
get/keep more than 1% and if we didn't we failed. For the most part
1-5% long term contributers out of consumers is considered a high
number for organizations.

> So.. the real question after this huge and with bad grammatical mail is:
> Do we, as design-marketing team can do an advertising campaign to get more
> help and spread even more Fedora?

One of the things to also realize is that multiple groups are doing
this right now and may not know that others are doing it. It would be
best to see what the marketing and ambassador groups are looking to do
as each has this sort of thing in their "mission" to do.

> If anyone has ads campaigns that can be examples (of good and bad stuff) or
> ideas, pls let me (us) know about them :)
>

One of the issues to look at is most of the above is selling
something.. where a person gives up money and gets something back. The
army is the opposite in that you give up X years, life, etc for
money+self-esteem+training+feeling your are doing something greater. I
would look at similar working ones and also look at failed ones to
help keep people aware of the pitfalls.

> See ya!
>
>
> [1] http://adage.com/century/campaigns.html
>
> --
> tatica
> Maria Gracia Leandro
> http://www.tatica.org
> http://www.fedora-ve.org
> http://proyectofedora.org
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MariaLeandro
> LinuxUser= 440285
> GPG Public Key: E1CDCC56
> "Be yourself... Don't be anyone else"
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren