Re: Events, promotional material, swag etc.

[John Slater]

Thanks for getting the conversation started on this. I'd love to hear more about what use cases you all think are necessary, but would like to note that I don't think we need to create a lot of specific imagery for events. In almost every case, our standard branding elements (Mozilla or Firefox in most examples) ought to be sufficient. As a general policy, we try to avoid fragmenting the brands by creating visual identities for each project.

Am happy to discuss further, but wanted to share that background.

Thanks-
John



*************************************
John Slater, Director of Creative
blog.mozilla.org/creative
twitter.com/mozcreative


On Apr 5, 2013, at 7:56 PM, Majken Connor wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I wanted to start a discussion about promoting events or projects,
> especially to do with imagery, related to branding etc.
>
> In my personal case I have some recurring events I'm trying to run out of
> the Toronto office. I know the Mozilla wordmark should be leveraged in the
> advertising and swag. At the same time, I think we know that when promoting
> something, we need some eye catching imagery, fancy wordsmithing etc to
> capture the viewer's attention, and create interest.
>
> I want to discuss and get a better grasp on the opinions of when custom
> imagery should be used, what it should consist of, how should it relate to
> use of regular Mozilla logos. How to tie in the event/project specific
> images to have some cohesiveness and call back to the static branding.
>
> For example, I love the team specific logos, like Grow Mozilla, Webmaker,
> Reps, that have tight relations to each other, the same colours, they use
> the Mozilla M (this is more loose in the Reps logo). I personally would
> gravitate towards using the M to tie in, but maybe that's only meant for
> high level projects?
>
> Take for example the NASA Space Apps Challenge coming up. It would be great
> for Mozilla participants to wear the same tshirt, to help show Mozilla's
> presence. It's also my personal opinion that it would be a bit boring, and
> maybe feel self-serving to just wear Firefox t-shirts. I think it would be
> cool to have some specific imagery/slogan to use that's specific to the
> event. Kind of like how in charity walks I've done, or in say car races you
> might see people on the same team wearing the same shirt, but it has event
> specific stuff on it, maybe the sponsors, and the event date. This also
> gives it the dual purpose as a keepsake. I know lots of people like
> collecting Mozilla shirts (and other tshirts for that matter) and
> especially stickers.
>
> That's on the very event specific end. Then you have more reusable things
> like logos for local communities.
>
> So I'm wondering if there are already best practices identified in these
> areas, what people's thoughts are - is event specific swag a selling point
> or does it dilute efforts (or does featuring the wordmark along side the
> custom images solve that problem? or some other cohesive element like the
> dinohead in the past). I know I'm in a so far unique position in that my
> local community is tied to a Mozilla office, so maybe this stuff hasn't
> been thought of much yet.
>
> Guidance and discussion appreciated!
> -Kensie
> _______________________________________________
> Interested in promoting Mozilla? Check out the Mozilla Community Marketing Guide: http://contribute.mozilla.org/Marketing
> mark...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing

[Majken Connor]

Yes, we definitely want to feature the main branding.

I'm just thinking, without any extra imagery, a poster would look like a
letter. As a consumer of advertising (I can't speak as an expert!) I know
there are always elements to catch my eye, and I would imagine it's
important. If I only see, say a McDonald's logo, I'll know it's an ad for
McDonald's and will feel no need to look further. Along those lines, I'm
trying to run 2 recurring events out of the Mozilla office that don't have
entirely the same audience. I imagine it would help my audience to have two
different looks for advertising each event, maybe even a secondary logo, so
that they can see this poster is about the event they want to go to, they
should stop and read it.

Then I can only repeat what I said before about t-shirts and stickers - I
think people would take more pride in wearing a shirt that is customized to
an event they participated in than a generic brand logo. I think it also
has the same effect as my McDonald's example. If someone sees the Mozilla
logo on a shirt, but also some other imagery they are probably more
inclined to ask the wearer about the shirt as they already know what
Mozilla is. The same with stickers. It's really cool to go to Mozilla
meet-ups and see all the different Mozilla stickers on peoples laptops.
People are always asking each other "What's that one from? How'd you get
it?" That wouldn't happen if it was just the brand logos.

Two concrete examples:

I made this poster to advertise the event I'm running this week (I don't
think this one ended up going up anywhere) -
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12kYY67vfswNMA8UDj6ELBCrEDRGO-tYGVjEpE_0gj4o/-
visually it's pretty boring, as I am mostly using text, and then the
mozilla logo is text as well.

Compare that to the flyers made for the Serbian Android campaign -
http://gingerzillian.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/serbian-community-the-revival/-
lots of colour, a consistent style across each flyer so you can feel
they're part of the same campaign, and then some really cool images with
the Firefox/Android logos and a phone.

Last thought, I think most of us saw that article/website a while back that
showed people's brand recognition where they distorted some major logos to
demonstrate how people could still recognize them in abstract (sorry I
couldn't find the link). I feel like we should be able to take something
(for example the m, as I used it on the poster, or Foxkeh for another
example) to be a bit more malleable, and people would still connect it with
Mozilla, but at the same time see there's something interesting about it
and attract their attention, or let them differentiate at a glance that
it's regarding a team or event they are interested in and know to pay more
attention to it.

So that's me, hopefully other people will chime in!

[sau...@rebugged.com]

>I think people would take more pride in wearing a shirt that is customized to
>an event they participated in than a generic brand logo.

I don't agree with this completely. Event specific swag is good but they get old fast.

For eg: If I have a "Firefox OS App Days, Delhi 2013" tshirt, it will be outdated after 2013.

But as you suggested, I like the idea of having different imagery besides the main identity element. It would be interesting. May be the front side of the tshirt can feature a non-standard image (like this[1] Firefox 3 t-shirt). But such customized t-shirts must have the main Mozilla/Firefox branding element at a consistent place such as may be the backside and/or on the left side of chest etc.

[1] -> https://twitter.com/saurabhx/status/326342581728473089

Saurabh

[Majken Connor]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 10:35 AM, <sau...@rebugged.com> wrote:

> >I think people would take more pride in wearing a shirt that is
> customized to
> >an event they participated in than a generic brand logo.
> I don't agree with this completely. Event specific swag is good but they
> get old fast.
>
> For eg: If I have a "Firefox OS App Days, Delhi 2013" tshirt, it will be
> outdated after 2013.
>

Ah, yes, I agree with you here. I'm not a fan of shirts with dates on them
either as it becomes obvious they're out-dated. However you can still have
something specific without putting the date on it, think of the different
Firefox shirts in the past, or eg the shirts for interns of different
years. Not being in the know, they're cool looking shirts that might spark
conversation, rather than wearable posters for the event.

[Pierros Papadeas]

Gradually we are moving towards having "series" of events with same
theme. FxOS App Days, Fx Clinics, MozCoffees, Launch Parties for FxOS
etc.
That will make it easier for us to produce event-specific swag but
still stay abstract on dates, locations so we can reuse them.

~p

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 10:36 PM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 10:35 AM, <sau...@rebugged.com> wrote:
>

>> >I think people would take more pride in wearing a shirt that is
>> customized to
>> >an event they participated in than a generic brand logo.
>> I don't agree with this completely. Event specific swag is good but they
>> get old fast.
>>
>> For eg: If I have a "Firefox OS App Days, Delhi 2013" tshirt, it will be
>> outdated after 2013.
>>
>

> Ah, yes, I agree with you here. I'm not a fan of shirts with dates on them
> either as it becomes obvious they're out-dated. However you can still have
> something specific without putting the date on it, think of the different
> Firefox shirts in the past, or eg the shirts for interns of different
> years. Not being in the know, they're cool looking shirts that might spark
> conversation, rather than wearable posters for the event.
>
>
>>

--
Pierros Papadeas
PGP key: 0x6130DBF8
http://pierros.papadeas.gr
pie...@papadeas.gr
liknus @ GRnet , Freenode

[flore.al...@gmail.com]

On the other hand, these shirt state "I was there". I for myself have some "outdated" T-shirts that I still wear proudly (Mozilla 10 years, 2004: the old world shall rise, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2, mozcamps...). I mean, they bear some history (for some of them, they are history), that's also nice...

[John Jensen]

Here's the most important entry in my T-shirt collection, which I received at a meeting of the Silicon Valley Linux Users' Group on April 1, 1998, the day after the Mozilla source code was released. Marc Andreessen presented and was received very well. I think I got another T-shirt at the party in San Francisco but it was lost in the maelstrom of that event.

http://imgur.com/wFF8Asu

The shirt is a little tired, a little worn, but very proud.

I'm glad it has a date on it.

John

> _______________________________________________
> Interested in promoting Mozilla? Check out the Mozilla Community
> Marketing Guide: http://contribute.mozilla.org/Marketing
> mark...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing
>

--

John Jensen jje...@mozilla.com
Product Strategist, Mozilla Corporation
mobile: +1 604 218 0400

[davidweld...@gmail.com]

John,

That's a great shirt. We're starting to collect stories and shirt photos for a Mozilla history project as part of the 15th anniversary.

Could you post more about when you got that shirt and link to that image in the comments of this history milestone blog post?

https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/04/15/milestone-the-mozilla-project-begins/

If any one else is interested in sharing their memories of certain milestones, we're posting a new milestone each week on the blog at

https://blog.mozilla.org/community/category/history/

David