Guerrilla Marketing: Firefox vs. IE8
Microsoft has been putting out quite a strong marketing campaign to promote downloads of its new browser, Internet Explorer 8, from its promise to “Feed 8 People” for each IE8 download (through donating $1.15 to Feeding America) and now starting an online treasure hunt buried somewhere on the web.
For the campaign “TenGrandisBuriedHere.com” the company allows you to download the browser and receive clues via Twitter towards a special webpage where $10,000 is “buried”. The first one to reach the web page gets to keep the money. The catch is that the page is only accessible in Internet Explorer so you need to download the browser. (Details)
It didn’t take long for Firefox to respond creating a parody website, TenGrandIsBuriedThere.com, a simple web page with a Google map which when zoomed in all the way shows a picture of the Firfox logo etched into a cornfield.
The website has already picked up traction in the blogosphere gathering over 1000 diggs and picking up coverage in a number of major industry blogs. It is a great example of a dead simple but creative guerrilla marketing campaign created by one of the developers at Mozilla as a side project, which completely took Microsoft’s campaign and made a mockery of it.
UPDATE: TechCrunch is reporting that the criticism and mockery of this campaign has led Microsoft to take action changing the rules of the contest so that you now no longer need to use Internet Explorer to access the $10,000 page. The campaign drew a lot of criticism from Microsoft executives and the general public after harsh wording on the campaign page asked users on browsers other than IE8 to “get rid of it or get lost” (since been removed).
