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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Cyber Cynic

The seven best Linux Foundation contest videos

37 comments

TAGS:advertising, Linux, Linux Foundation, Video
IT TOPICS:Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software

Linux doesn't have much in the way of advertising. While Apple's wonderful "I'm a Mac" TV ad campaign is famous, and Microsoft's Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ads are infamous, Linux really doesn't have anything. Now, the Linux Foundation is trying to change that with it's "We're Linux" Video Contest.

The winning designer will get a free trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009. The Linux Foundation doesn't have the money for a major, or for that matter even a minor, television advertising campaign. But, at the very least, the winning ad will get some news and online exposure for both the winner and Linux.

I'm not a judge on the committee that will decide the winner, but I do know a little bit about both Linux and marketing. So, here are my seven favorite picks in the contest. I tried, I really did, to cut the list to five, but I couldn't do it. It was hard enough to get to seven.

Whether the committee will like these is a mystery to me. We'll all find out together at the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit in San Francisco on April 8, 2009.

Before launching into this, let me start by saying that these are all a bit rough. If someone were to come along with a few million to run them on the major television networks, they'd need to re-shoot them. So, when you look at these, don't think you're going to see something that looks like the "I'm a Mac" campaign. You're not.

7) Soy un PC y uso Linux. In English, this is "I'm a PC, and I run Linux." It was filmed at the Open Source World Conference 2008 Málaga, Spain, and just shows a variety of people saying the line in all their different languages. It's simple, but it works.

There were several ads that played with the theme of looking at all the different kinds of people who use Linux. Another ad pointed out that people of all ages can use Linux. This one, though, just caught my fancy. It's just real people of all kinds and sorts from all manner of places saying that Linux is for them. Thumbs up from me.

6) I'm Linux. The most polished of the "I'm Linux" ads, and the one that's closest to being production ready, came from Page One Public Relations. Page One, for those of you who don't know them, is perhaps the most open-source savvy of all the PR firms. After all, one of its chief partners, Lonn Johnston, is a former VP of North American operations for Turbolinux.

Besides touching on the theme of We're All Linux Users, from the personal side, the ad also riffs on the numerous services, like Google, and products, like the TiVo, that do indeed make all of us Linux users.

5) I'm not Linux, Version 3. This is just a video of a guy talking about Linux. Usually, this kind of thing is pretty dull, but with multiple scene changes, this one works. You can tell he means what he's saying and I like his tag-line: "I'm not Linux, Linux is me."

4) And if Da Vinci ... So if Leonardo da Vinci had had Linux, what would he do? This is nicely done. Come to think of it, if da Vinci were alive today, I think he would be using Linux. I also like this video's tag-line: "What if YOU used it?"

3) Challenges at the Office. This is another ad that's close to being able to be shown "as is" on network television. The premise, two office mates playing rock, paper, scissors, Linux. (Watch it, you'll see how it works) is fun and it's well executed. It's also a good ad for a mainstream audience, since it doesn't assume you know anything about Linux and, within a minute, makes two good points on why you might want to consider it.

2) Linux Pub. This is, to my mind, the funniest of all the videos. A dying PC is rushed to the emergency room, and - on no! - it's not going to make it. But then, a Linux penguin charges in to save the day. Good silly fun.

1) Be Linux. Two words: Flying penguins. It's high-concept. It's stirring. It's funny. And, it makes its point with a great tag-line: "Imagine a place where everyone can fly: Be Linux." IBM? Red Hat? Novell? You've got the money. This ad, this ad works. If I had a multi-million dollar ad budget, this is the one I'd be showing.

ADDITION: I'm vexed to report that the video from my #1 ad was lifted from a BBC ad by Terry Jones. I still like the ad, but credit where credit's due and fiormer Monty Pythoner Jones was the one who came up with the videography.

Finally, I can't finish this tale without mentioning the best video I've ever seen for Linux, or for any other technology for that matter. It's much too long to be an ad spot, but Red Hat's Truth Happens is a must watch for anyone who likes Linux, or, wants to see a perfect match between video, words, and concept.

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Mediocre At Best

Submitted by likemindead on March 19, 2009 - 8:21 A.M.

These are awfully full of FAIL.

Seriously, this is the best?

O_o

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10 Years Later Why Windows is Still Here

Submitted by Dohn Joe on March 17, 2009 - 11:15 P.M.

Jeez...Linux people are not Ad and PR savvy at all. No flash...no glam...no TV-ability. Mac sucks, Windows sucks more, but with videos like these promoting Linux it's no wonder Windows is still king of the hill and Mac is gaining ground!

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Openlook, Motif, CDE, Solaris, SVR5, AIX, UX .....

Submitted by Eldon on March 17, 2009 - 8:56 P.M.

Serious deja vu here. Saw Microsoft and others win a bunch of market segments and, especially, the desktop, once before when a more open, multi-source, multi-distro "competitor" presented itself as many rather than one. When you look at the business and the money in particular, I don't see much different this time around that would cause a band of competing distros to team up against a common foe, together. Individual self-interest getting in the way of group self-interest. The irony of "if we win, I don't win" isn't that ironic when revenue and profit are on the line, unfortunately.

The community, on the other hand, isn't capitalized to solve these problems without the self-interested benefactors and may not even care whether they're solved nearly as much as all of us that talk so much about it so much.

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Why Linux Specific Ads Won't Fly.

Submitted by Anon--nuna on March 16, 2009 - 3:28 P.M.

Steven, Can't believe your best response to my earlier comment was to play the Microsoft Schill card. You made no attempt to address the salient points made within the comment.

Below is one of my comments that were part of a discussion on Linux Specific advertising from 2007. I'll add a link to the entire thread separately. Anon--nuna.

"Marcel Gagne’ notion of a unified marketing board has some merit, would work to some degree, but this collective, generic, product promotion is fairly outmoded and is a fairly obsolete methodology in todays marketplace. Most of todays consumers are “brand-conscious”, have been conditioned as such for decades now.

A true personal example to hi-lite this fact: Recently while working late I called a local pizza shop for a delivery order. Wanting something other than pizza, I asked the sales clerk (28+ years old)if they had “tortilla chips” to go with the sandwich I had ordered, to which she replied no. I asked what they did have. Her very first response was “We have Doritos” and continued to name a variety of flavors as well. She didn’t know that Doritos were tortilla chips even though her job is to sell them.

Generic product marketing originated decades ago, pretty much before the Reagan era deregulation which started the avalanche of corporate mergers, acquisitions and buyouts. The significance of this will be made a bit clearer below.

Using your examples, prior to deregulation, there were a huge number of local (mom-n-pop) milk dairies and pork farmers scattered across the entire US. It made sense for these individual small producers to chip-in and market their products collectively and generically because they were all in physically (brick-n-mortar) different geographical locations. As such, they were not in direct competition with one an other. As time passed (post Reagan era), large corporations forced many of these small producers out of business using various mechanisms such as promoting environmental laws and excessive government regulations that were difficult if not impossible for the small producers to comply with, while leaving all of their necessary loopholes buried deep within the verbiage of these laws. As such, and as they grew larger by buying into more markets (at bankruptcy prices), their specific corporate brand/s on their way to monopoly were the only things that made sense for them to promote.

Upon analysis, the collective generic product marketing method when viewed from the prospective of the small GNU/Linux distro producer is outright suicide because they share the exact same market location with the major players. Any GNU/Linux distro can be sold from anywhere–to anywhere on the planet. The small distro’s participation in such a program promotes their better known competitors way more than they themselves. In short, currently, Cononical/Ubuntu would be getting a bit of corporate welfare from its weaker competitors.

1980’s Reagan deregulation ushered in the era of the eventuality of multinational global monopolies. The only question for us in the free software community is, who will eventually gain effective (monopoly) ownership and control of GNU/Linux through market momentum. Will it be community, or some corporate entity? Gaining a preemptive monopoly with a standardized community core would as a logical result, keep the corporate monopoly want-to-be’s in their proper place by removing the game. And, the generic GNU/Linux product marketing model would be more valid. Plus this would help ensure that free software would be an oasis of free-enterprise capitalism, where everyone who wants to may participate, instead of monopoly capitalism where a few global elite hold all the cards.

Marcel Gagne’ suggestion shows a lack of understanding of the many underlying marketplace dynamics. So too, the recent Tux 500 initiative was met with fairly tepid enthusiasm because these and other points were not factored into their model.

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You make sense.

Submitted by Anonymous on March 17, 2009 - 8:52 A.M.

If I'm reading your comments correctly you make sense. While I think some of these commercials are great I don't believe people are being realistic. At the end of the MS commercials you see something like "Go to www.microsuck.com/windows for more". If they go there they see product info on Windows. If they go to the store they see the Windows logo that has been burned into their head.

Now where does a person go after a Linux commercial? Well they aren't going to see a penguin in any store. They may go to Linux.com but what do they see there? They see information on Linux but this doesn't get them the features they saw in some of the commercials. They'll have to be told about distros and the differences and guided into picking one. Now I highly doubt the Linux Foundation is going to detail every distro out there nor are they going to side with a few over the rest and much less 1.

Advertising is going to have to come from the distro level. And to be honest every distro out there advertising would only cause confusion because the end user sees this as a flood of OS's hitting the market and not different flavors of the same thing. You're really only going to do well with one distro.

If you ask me...the Linux Foundation and the heavy hitter distros...if they want to really spur desktop adoption should come together and create a neutral product. They should call this Flagship Linux and contribute parts of their distro to this so that a new Windows convert could come in and learn about the diversity of Linux on one distro. As they learn more they can either stay with Flagship or migrate to another distro of their choice which should be made to be as easy as possible. This way no one can b*tch and moan about distro A is getting all the popularity while disto B does more work or distro C really works better or KDGnoFce sucks vs EnliFlux. Yet each distro gets to keep their distinct focus and can advertise its focus with Flagship so that the user can make and educated choice.

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What in blazes...

Submitted by Ron on March 16, 2009 - 5:10 P.M.

...are you talking about?

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Can't Grasp The Concepts? Abstain..

Submitted by Anon on March 16, 2009 - 6:49 P.M.

If you weren't able to grasp the overall core concepts involved in the posting or within the accompanying full thread the link points to, perhaps you would have been better advised to have stayed silent in the cheap seats, instead of wasting a post just to say "Duhh....???".

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As near as I can tell...

Submitted by Ron on March 17, 2009 - 5:38 A.M.

You are not a Microsoft shill, and SJVN's comment was inaccurate at the very least, out of line at the most.

I guess you're peeved at the perception and promotion of Linux, you would rather have products integrating Linux promoted on their own merits, not the Linux itself being promoted.

What you need to do is consider that you're talking to a bunch of working stiffs, for the most part, who aren't impressed by your flowery language.

If you can state your point in ten words, why use 500?

BTW, I agree with your approach. However, I think that promoting Linux itself is also a good idea. And I engage in the ultimate promotion of the product: I install it for people and show them how to use it. THAT is where the future of Linux growth lies, IMHO.

Well, back to the cheap seats...

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