Submitted by The advertisement wars are really heating up, with Microsoft going on the full assault against Apple with several TV advertisements, after Apple had been pounding the Redmond company with its “I’m a PC” campaign. Just as Microsoft published the third Laptop Hunters commercial, the Linux Foundation announced the winner of the “We’re Linux” contest.
The “We’re Linux” contest was set up by the Linux Foundation to encourage Linux users to demonstrate in 1 minute videos why they used Linux, and why others should try it as well – Linux commercials, basically. There were 90 contest entries, and a combination of community voting and a panel of judges led to one winner, and two runner-ups. The winner can be seen below, but I personally find the first runner up to be better.
While I think both of these are pretty well done, they do fail in one important aspect. We are all geeks here, we’ll get the videos. But what about the majority of the world, who have little knowledge on this whole Linux and Free thing? I think that if you want to use the Free/open aspect effectively in a commercial for Linux, you need to clearly show two things. One, what Linux actually is. Two, how being Free/open benefits you, the customer. While these videos are well made, they do not address either of these two points.
Microsoft also pushed out another Laptop Hunters advertisement, this time about an 11 year old kid buying a gaming laptop.
The kiddo wants a laptop with “speed, a big hard drive, and a gaming computer”, for under 1500 USD. It follows the known format, and they end up buying a Sony Vaio with Blu Ray (which is apparently something to get very excited about) and 5.5 hours of battery life.
What’s there to say, other than that I loved the facial expression of the mother when talking about the Macs? The ad follows the basic format, and it’s fairly effective at highlighting the fact that on the PC side, there’s lots of choice.
Those MS ads would be really cool if they were real. Just give people $1.5k and look what they end up buying. I think a 10 to 20% would buy a Mac.
(I would buy probably buy a Dell business laptop with Ubuntu )
Someone needs to “leak” (read “parody the ad series”) an ad where the stars got a mac. That, or add in “Now, what version of Linux should I download?” to the end of it
If I had 1.6k I could buy that new dell server that has 5 pci express 2.0 slots and make the upgrades with parts I buy elsewhere and beat the mac pro’s 8 screens with 10.
True. I’m sure if they said, “you have a limit of $1500 on a laptop of your choice using your own money – you’d see most would would go for the cheapest laptop they could find. If they gave the person $1500 and said, “buy what ever you want” – it would be interesting to see the users would be more inclined to go for a Mac given it isn’t their own money being used.
What I find funny is that they’re focusing on the edge 33% of consumers when Apple address the needs of the bulk of end users sitting in the middle, the 66%. The question – as a business, do yo focus all your attention on the 33% which will require 12 different models of a given laptop or do you focus on the 66% where you can have a smaller range and not over extend yourself?
I was rooting for Tron guy:
http://dmartin.org/weblog/hi-im-linux
(p.s. I’m a Linux user!)
Let me guess, his original suite was not quite the way he liked it so he had to rip it apart and build it up himself or perhaps it came consisting of the fabric only and he had to compile it himself?
Nah, the suit came as a flat pack industrial loom made from renewable sources, and a packet of fair trade cotton plant seeds.
The Tron guy is quite cool, but how about real UNIX? Guess what I’m using. =^_^=
http://bookseobook.com/files/mac-vs-unix-vs-vista.jpg
Yes, I know all of you are familiar with the picture, so you should forgive me for mentioning it. 🙂
The really funny part – every time I go to the local Mac shop, it is a shop full of people like that; heck, I look like that with my laptop. I guess there are some truths in the stereotype of the average Mac user
The problem is that people nowadays are so reliant on “the news” and TV for their information that they see an ad like this and simply eat it up hook line and sinker. People believe everything they see hear and read regardless of whether or not the source of the information is dubious. “Mommy, we can’t buy an iMac because the man on TV said it was like a toy!” “Oh, okay honey, we’ll get you a far superior Vista PC instead.”
I’m not thrilled with the Linux ad…It doesn’t catch the person’s attention and it uses a language that only geeks understand. What do you mean by free? Am I not free when I use a computer? What is Linux by the way? Pointless…Next!
…. Is very nice. But it will not appeal to general public. It’s more like a preview/teaser of a new tv series or a film.
I work at an advertising agency. The commercial that won is actually a very effective spot. They focused on one thing and represented it simply. There is no way they can shove everything about Linux in a 30 sec ad, so it starts slow. It would have to be turned into a series for it to be most effective. Marketing is an weird field (I find it evil IMO) but they do know how to affect the masses.
Now, about that runner up. Did anyone else get a sinister feeling about it? Hell, by the end of it I thought it was going to say “We are Legion”. Am I alone in this?
I hate you! You spoiled it
He he he, yeah it was dark, like introducing a bunch of new villains in Heroes. But still… I like it 
Maybe not “We are Legion”. What I got from it was a virus splitting and multiplying. No, I am not saying Linux is a virus folks, I use it. That is the impression it gave me though.
Got the same bad impression too. I liked the winner though. As others have said, this would have to be the first in a series of ads.
BTW, here is a link to the LinuxFoundation youtube channel (first runner up):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1GYHQhqtbU
The Linux ads were about as vague as the old OS/2 ads with nuns and old surfer dudes talking about “shore slop”.
Linux is a circle that gives you the option to resize windows?
//that’s what I got
And I thought Microsoft ads were bad. Yet, they are improving a little bit. There’s only two angles Linux can push from an ad perspective.
1. It’s FREE!!!! as in beer.
2. Show people struggling to open old file format or something frustrating with interop… then position Linux as the open and free solution.
They forgot to mention that they were made with a Mac.
Source? That’d be pretty funny.
Check out the comments of the #1 Runner Up – he uses After Effects and Final Cut Pro and Pixelmator. I thought it was funny too.
I liked the #1 Runner Up the best, but it was a little too moody and overblown for Linux. Like the opening to a new Matrix tv series or something. It’s just Linux after all, not that great in the scheme of things.
Still, some good stylist effects in that piece.
I’ll clarify that: I liked them all somewhat. However, cool as the others were, I thought the winning ad seemed the most appropriate for exposing “average” consumers to. The others seemed more appropriate for geeky markets, maybe to IT people…
I honestly didn’t think the mentions of Freedom, Choice, etc were necessarily a problem. In terms of tech marketing they don’t mean that much to a consumer – but (in our culture, at least!) they are considered Good Things and the mention of them in connection to computing should seem intriguing to the target audience. It’s a bit like Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign – it’s presenting Linux as somehow unique and interesting, leaving the specifics to a future advert, perhaps.
The Microsoft adverts … well, on the one hand they are presenting some of the key strengths of the PC (choice and price in the hardware). Apple has been targeting them fairly ruthlessly with the Mac vs PC adverts. For such a dominant company as Microsoft to be making a series of ads where people repeatedly go “Oh no, can’t buy an Apple because <foo>” does seem like an acknowledgment that Apple are more of a threat than previously admitted… I’m reminded of:
“”First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi
I’d like to stress that I’m not an Apple fan, I don’t buy their stuff and I don’t expect them to “win” (FWIW nor do I expect them to “lose”). They do make good products, just not ones that suit me. The main reason I picked that particular quote is that Microsoft’s newly specific anti-Apple advertising does suggest that Apple has been making inroads and gaining mindshare, thus progressing from the “ignore” to the “ridicule / fight” stage.
One thing that seemed odd about this latest ad: there didn’t seem much mention of “Oh, look at all these games for the PC” and “There aren’t many games for Mac”. I know that plenty of games do get released for the Mac but AFAIK the PC is the gamers’ choice still. I’m quite surprised they didn’t emphasize this more, given gaming was mentioned.
For the last 5 years or so, it seems that computer gaming (be it PC or Mac) has been steadily dwindling & losing out to consoles – and I say that as someone who hasn’t owned a console since the Genesis. It seems that the only big names left in PC gaming are Valve and Blizzard.
Admittedly, it’s largely because consoles have become steadily more PC-like (starting with the Dreamcast). But (IMO) a large part of the success of the XBox line has been directly due to Microsoft deliberately cannibalizing the PC gaming market – buying up PC game dev. companies and “re-focusing” them on the XBox, or paying for exclusives.
Which is probably not something they want to focus attention on.
Don’t forget EA, Epic, Vivendi, ID Software, 3D Realms, and Microsoft. Those are all still pretty big names when it comes to gaming.
I should have been more specific: I meant companies that still focus primarily on PC games.
With id, I haven’t seen anything from them since Doom 3 (other than a few mentions of “Rage”). 3D Realms – have they put out anything since Prey – back in 2006?
As for Microsoft, the only PC games I’ve from them lately are effectively ports of games – 2 or 3 years after they were released for the XBox.
Edited 2009-04-10 18:57 UTC
I thought it was simple, to the point, attractive, and compelling.
The freedom to do whatever you want with your computer is a compelling sell, even to non-geeks.
Even the proverbial “Joe User” or “Aunt Tillie” users run into frustrations with dealing with roadblocks or artificial limitations put on them by both Windows PCs and Macs.
That ad represented limitless possibility, and associated it strongly with Linux.
That’s a very good start. There are other compelling features about Linux, which can be represented in follow up ads. But this one gets the ball rolling.
I’m impressed.
I also think it’s a good selling point of the open source community – that a contest end users in the community could produce such a compelling ad.
IMHO, the Linux/Freedom ad is much, much better than the Jerry/Bill MS ads (which were slightly ammusing, but horribly lame in saying anything), the “I’m a PC” ads (which were saying “No, Mac ads, PCs are cool, so neener neener!”), and even better than the current “Consumer looking for features within $1500 budget” ads (which, btw, I think are quite good).
Why would “Linux” need any ads?
Those who know about it don’t need it at all.
And those who don’t know need an ad for “Gnome” or “KDE” or “Ubuntu” or “Mandriva” (or LyX, for that matter 😉 ) rather than “Linux”.
It may have entertainment value, obviously. 🙂
The penguin ad was the best, at least they didn’t take themselves seriously.
Next time that Vista tells me it will take four hours to unzip a 28MB file that Linux and MacOSX can both unzip in minutes (on the same hardware) I will certainly be comforted by Microsofts adds that tell me how much more powerful Windows is.
Some of the sluggish behaviour of Windows on very powerful hardware is almost incomprehensible to me.
Why not put that kind of thing in an Advert?
The winning Linux freedom advert is just too abstract.
Edited 2009-04-11 12:50 UTC
if you gave me 1500 dollars.. i’d buy a mac… a fast pc is like a ferrari with the ecu of a ford escort. sure it’s got tonnes of power but it’s useless with the wrong operating system.
and linux will always be a joke… it’s a hack job..
OSNews/Linux Foundation seems to emphasize that the ad must talk about the benefits of being free. I’m running a free operating system, writing now using a free browser and there are a lot of ways out there for showing these videos using free software, but I can’t because it’s in Flash*.
Funny. For more than a decade, I don’t know what most of people means when they say free. Even when these people are the “big guys” trying to spread that free is better.
This would be a good ad for the FSF, but not Linux imho – not everything that’s a part of your typical Linux distribution is what I’d consider free. Certainly, not the type of freedom that the advert implies.
It’s an OK ad, but a bit bland imho. It doesn’t really grab the attention, and most ordinary non techie viewers would probably go ‘so what’.
Dave