On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 23:00 -0400, Louis Suarez-Potts wrote: > > Really is our fault for not doing much 'think out of the box' like > > the folks from abiword. For all our google links we could have had > > some campaigns up on Google ads. > > We did, at one point, a couple of years ago. A unnamed donor enabled > us to have a slew of ads for OOo. Didn't do much, which I guess is > the lesson of the Internet: it's a money drain for advertisers, > funnelling cash to Google.
I guess it depends who is advertising and why. If you read up to date marketing theory, there are a few basic principles. One is that new products have to saturate the innovators and early adopters before they make in-roads into the main population so targeting advertising on the main population is a waste of time and resources. The early adopters who are influential in other market sectors give the confidence to them. As an example, I was at a meeting yesterday with officers of a town council in SE England. I'm helping them bid for a large government grant to do something innovative in technology. They had heard of Open Source but were not confident about it. I come as a consultant with a reputation for knowledge in the public sector which is their business, that is what we initially discuss and I get professional credibility because I know their business. Then when I suggest we get every household in the entire town on line and use Open Source as the method of getting the price down to just 50p a month on the rent for the new social housing project they are planning, instead of thinking I'm a crackpot, they listen. They are mainstream users, they are not going to change their technology because of seeing a Google, TV or a Newspaper Ad. Once they are using FLOSS successfully others in other towns will follow. Once its into mainstream users big time it *might* be worth raising general brand awareness through advertising but I bet there will be better ways of spending the money. Mass advertising is more about making existing users confident than it is about getting new users. > Amusingly, I see similar language here. Though I put together the ad > campaign and wrote the copy, still the templates were not unlike > those used by others..... > > best > Louis -- Ian Lynch www.theINGOTs.org www.opendocumentfellowship.org www.schoolforge.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
