Advertising

Best Linux Marketing Campaigns

Bryan Lunduke — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 13:00:00 +0000

I have long held the opinion that one of the biggest problems holding back Linux-based systems from dominating (market-share-wise) in the desktop computing space...is marketing. Our lack of attention-grabbing, hearts-and-minds-winning marketing is, in my oh-so-humble opinion, one of the most glaring weaknesses of the Free and Open Source Software world.

But, in a way, me saying that really isn't fair.

The reality is that we have had some truly fantastic marketing campaigns through the years. A few even managed to break outside our own Linux-loving community. Let's take a stroll through a few of my favorites.

From my vantage point, the best marketing has come from two places: IBM (which is purchasing Red Hat) and SUSE. Let's do this chronologically.

IBM's "Peace. Love. Linux."

Back in 2001, IBM made a major investment in Linux. To promote that investment, obviously, an ad campaign must be launched! Something iconic! Something catchy! Something...potentially illegal!

Boy, did they nail it.

"Peace. Love. Linux." Represented by simple symbols: a peace sign, a heart and a penguin, all in little circles next to each other. It was visually pleasing, and it promoted happiness (or, at least, peace and love). Brilliant!

IBM then paid to have more than 300 of these images spray-painted across sidewalks all over San Francisco. The paint was supposed to be biodegradable and wash away quickly. Unfortunately, that didn't happen—many of the stencils still were there months later.

And, according to the mayor, "Some were etched into the concrete, so, in those cases, they will never be removed."

The response from the city was...just as you'd expect.

After months of discussion, the City of San Francisco fined Big Blue $100,000, plus any additional cleanup costs, plus legal fees.

On the flip-side, the stories around it made for a heck of a lot of advertising!

IBM's "The Kid"

Remember the Linux Super Bowl ad from IBM? The one with the little boy sitting in a room of pure white light?

"He's learning. Absorbing. Getting smarter every day."

When that hit in 2004, it was like, whoa. Linux has made it. IBM made a Super Bowl ad about it!

"Does he have a name? His name...is Linux."

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Let's talk advertising

Doc Searls — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 18:19:07 +0000

by Doc Searls

This is the first in a series of posts in which members of our still-small staff raise topics for discussion. Since I'm a veteran of both the journalism and advertising businesses, I'll start this discussion.

First, we're wiping all advertising off the Linux Journal site and starting with a clean slate. This is a bit complicated because we're also upgrading the site from Drupal 6 to 8, which is a bit like rebuilding an occupied house. So bear with us through that.

Second, if we ever go back to running ads, they won't be of the spying kind generally called "adtech." I have been an enemy of adtech from its start, and for years have led in the movement to kill it. I've done that through my work with ProjectVRM and its spinoff Customer Commons (both at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center), and here at Linux Journal (examples here, here, here, here and here).

As I say here,

"Adtech is a cancer on advertisers, publishers, and everybody it tracks.

We already have one form of chemo in ad blocking. According to PageFair’s 2017 Adblock Report, at least 11% of the world’s population is now blocking ads on at least 615 million devices. According to GlobalWebIndex, 37% of all mobile users, worldwide, were blocking ads by January of 2016, and another 42% would like to. With more than 4.77 billion mobile phone users in the world by 2017, that means more than 1.7 billion people are blocking ads already: a sum exceeding the population of the Western Hemisphere.

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Neuranet's Flexitive

James Gray — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:24:05 +0000

by James Gray

The new Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Standard Ad Unit Portfolio's support for flexible ads is intended to improve the ad experience for users and boost revenue potential for advertisers. An updated solution from Neuranet, its Flexitive 2.0 responsive design software, is designed to solve today's design challenges and give media companies and agencies a significant advantage in adapting to the IAB's new Flex Specifications and Lean Guidelines that were released in summer 2017.

Flexitive 2.0 is the next generation of Neuranet's HTML5 cloud-based platform that supports more advanced responsive design capabilities for building high-quality, animated HTML5-based designs that adapt to unlimited sizes across any device, operating system, app or browser. The new standards were designed to promote user-friendly digital advertising that can scale across device types easily.

Flexitive also incorporates the LEAN principles of lightweight, encrypted, AdChoices-supported and non-invasive advertising. Neuranet emphasizes other key features of Flexitive 2.0, such as an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that requires no coding knowledge, unlimited sizing of a single design, two-click creative design variations with instant scaling, export for use in more than 30 ad servers and more.

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Celtra's AdCreator Platform

James Gray — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 11:53:17 +0000

by James Gray

Mobile advertising campaigns today are often hampered by broken, non-viewable ads with a poor UX experience. An important open-source initiative aimed at solving this problem and making the web better for all is the AMP Project, which enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.

Now, Celtra AdCreator, a SaaS creative management platform for digital advertising, integrates support for the creation of AMP Ads, a new standard for making ads faster, lighter and more secure. Celtra foresees a transformative power in this new product, because AMP helps pave the way for better creative, a significantly improved customer experience and higher mobile ad engagement rates and resulting ROI. Celtra AdCreator overcomes the barriers of cost of data and slow network speed that make it difficult to engage with viewers meaningfully.

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The Problem with "Content"

Doc Searls — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 15:23:11 +0000

by Doc Searls

Back in the early '00s, John Perry Barlow said "I didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business felt threatened." Linux Journal was one of those containers—so was every other magazine, newspaper and broadcast station. Today, those containers are bobbing around in an ocean of "content" on the internet. Worse, the stuff inside the containers, which we used to call "editorial", is now a breed of "content" too.

In the old days, editorial lived on one side of a "Chinese wall" between itself and the publishing side of a newspaper or magazine. The same went for the programming and advertising sides of a commercial broadcast station or network. The wall was transparent, meaning it was possible for a writer, a photographer, a newscaster or a performing artist to see what funded the operation, but the ethical thing was to ignore what happened on the other side of that wall. Which was easy to do, because everything on the other side of that wall was somebody else's job.

Today that wall has been destroyed by the imperatives of "content production", which is the new job of journalists and everybody else devoted to "generating content" in maximum volumes, all the better to attract "programmatic" advertising.

You can see the wreckage of one such wall in a January 2017 The New York Times story titled "In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left", by David Chen. In it he writes, "The Star-Ledger, which almost halved its newsroom eight years ago, has mutated into a digital media company requiring most reporters to reach an ever-increasing quota of page views as part of their compensation."

As I explained in my January 2016 article "What We Can Do with Ad Blocking's Leverage", the advertising we're talking about here isn't the old Madison Avenue kind that lived on the other side of journalism's Chinese wall. It's a new all-digital kind called adtech. While adtech is called advertising, and looks like advertising, it is actually a breed of direct marketing, a cousin of spam descended from junk mail.

Like junk mail, adtech is data-driven, wants to get personal, finds success in tiny-percentage responses and excuses massive negative externalities. Those include wanton and unwelcome surveillance, annoying the crap out of people and filling the world with crap—including fake news and fraudulent advertising.

Here's one way to tell the difference between real advertising and adtech, using the Star-Ledger as an example:

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Progress on Privacy

Doc Searls — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 11:30:36 +0000

by Doc Searls

The internet didn't come with privacy, any more than the planet did. But at least the planet had nature, which provided raw materials for the privacy technologies we call clothing and shelter. On the net, we use human nature to make our own raw materials. Those include code, protocols, standards, frameworks and best practices, such as those behind free and open-source software.

So far, our best privacy tech is encryption. But I won't dwell on that one, because I assume all Linux Journal readers are experts at that. Instead, I want to visit three others, all of which are new.

The first is agreements.

The most popular informal agreements in the physical world are called secrets. These aren't especially enforceable, but they are backed by norms, which are powerful constraints operating in a social context. For example, we trust that people, other than the intended recipient, won't open a sealed envelope, even if they can. The seal (such as the one shown in Figure 1) signals secrecy and has been in use for hundreds of years.

Figure 1. Seal Signaling Secrecy

More formal are the legal agreements we call terms. We encounter these every time we click "agree" to something that looks like what is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The Legal Agreements We Call Terms

Did you read that? Go back and try reading it again.

These are "contracts of adhesion", defined (by the Legal Dictionary) as "a standardized contract offered to consumers on a 'take it or leave it' basis without giving the consumer an opportunity to bargain for terms that are more favorable". After industry won the industrial revolution, large companies needed to create legal agreements for dealing with up to millions of customers. Contracts of adhesion were the only way. Alas, this also sidelined freedom of contract, "which allows parties to provide for the terms and conditions that will govern the relationship" (says LawTeacher.net).

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