Firefox Flicks Backstage

We’re getting very close to opening up the Firefox Flicks Fan Sponsorship program. If you’d like to be one of the people featured on TV in our first test airing of Flicks on TV, stay tuned.

We’re getting closer and closer to seeing Firefox Flicks on TV! We wanted to share some more details with you about where and when some of the Flicks-turned-TV-ads will appear and who is helping us to put them there.

For starters, Flicks will run in both Boston and San Francisco during the holiday season on selected cable channels like Comedy Central, ESPN, TNT, History Channel, USA, and MTV. Both Boston and San Francsco were chosen because of their large number of cable households and likelihood to contain a high proportion of savvy web users. For those of you who don’t live in either area, we’ll have the Flicks as they appear on TV posted on a page to share. Also, once we have the full schedule, we’ll let you know approximately when and where a Flick will appear.  Eventually, based on the success of this initial program, we would like to roll Firefox Flicks out to many more regions in order to spread Firefox to all parts of the US!

In order to help bring Flicks to TV, we’ve partnered with Spot Runner, the first Internet-based ad agency that makes it really easy for companies like Mozilla to advertise on TV. Spot Runner does TV advertising — commercial production, media planning and buying. They are going to help us buy the actual air-time and get each selected Flick ready for its TV debut!

Stay tuned — there is much more to come over the next couple of weeks, including more details about how you can see your name on TV.

Thanks to everyone who has posted feedback about their favorite Flick for TV.

We have an exciting new component of the program to announce!

Taking a cue from the amazing success of the Firefox 1.0 celebration announcement in the New York Times, we’ve decided to do something similar for Flicks!

Full details to be posted soon, but suffice it to say that a limited number of people will be able to participate in this first test run and see their name on TV along with a Firefox Flicks ad, so keep an eye out here for next steps and get those TV remotes and digital video recorders ready!

As written in a previous post, we’re going to be doing something very cool to Spread Firefox. We’re really excited about the prospect of reaching out to millions of people and getting them jazzed about using a browser that so many folks love using as a part of everyday life. Over the coming weeks, our intention is to demystify the process of airing a TV ad for Firefox and have you involved in the process as we go from concept to air sometime late this fall. Think of it as kind of a combination of Insider meets choose-your-own-adventure.

Our goals for airing on TV are simiple: to get people to download Firefox and give it a test-drive; to get the Firefox name out to the masses; and to see if TV actually works as an advertising medium for Firefox. There were many outstanding Flicks submissions that could have worked well as commercial spots. We narrowed down the submissions to choices that met three basic criteria:

1. Appeal to a wide, mainstream audience
2. Capture an audience’s attention and imagination
3. Don’t directly attack our competition by name

Here are some questions that may help guide the selection:

• Which Flicks make you proud to be Firefox user?
• Which Flicks do you think people that use other browsers would like best and why?
• Which Flicks grab your attention?
• Which Flicks do you think would appeal to a less saavy web user?

Below is a list of flicks that we feel meet the above three criteria best:

Daredevil, This is Hot, Billy’s Browser, Web for All, Give me the soap, Painter, One Window for Every Reason, Improve, No comparison, Sunday Morning, Life Lessons.

More to come, but in the meantime we would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions about and which of the Flicks on the list you’d like to see on air.