Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

From the start, I viewed the Linux Foundation's contest to create an ad for GNU/Linux with apprehension. In theory, I can see where promotional material for free software is needed to help explain it to the average computer user. However, as someone who has deliberately developed his own mental version of ad-blocker, I find that the idea makes me uneasy. Today, advertising is one of the major repositories for visual cliche in our culture. Could the contest entries move beyond the usual cliches? More importantly, could they manage the difficult job of explaining free software in basic terms?

Unfortunately, after looking at the winners and many of the other entries, I conclude that they couldn't.

From one perspective, the winners successfully imitated the structure of professional ads. The winner and the first runner up in particular captured perfectly the unctuous cadences of a voiceover speaking vaguely mystical generalities. With stereotypical electronic music looping in the background, the winner recited a list of answers to its initial question, "What does it mean to be free?" The first runner-up lacked the music (although it did have sound effects), but went on in equally vague terms about evolution.

Given my mental ad-blocker, I had to watch both several times before I could absorb them, because I kept tuning them out. I'd seen their like before countless times, so they had the effect that any cliche does: I stopped paying attention, even when I made a conscious effort.

The second runner up was the only one of the winners to feature live actors. Although the actors were obviously amateurs, they at least held my attention more than the crude animation of the other two.

But the second runner up was a cliche of another sort, showing a computer suffering from "viral infection and memory loss" being rushed into a hospital emergency room, where the doctors are helpless to save it. Just as all seems lost, an unbearably smug Tux lays hands on it, then waddles off with a nurse under each wing, his voice so self-satisfied that you just know there's a smirk under the costume.

With its attempt at drama, the entry was playing off the countless medical dramas that have been littered television for the last fifty years. It was playing for laughs, perhaps, but still following a predictable pattern that, ultimately, I had seen too many times to focus on easily.

But, if the winners failed to produce anything new or arresting, all three suffered even more from their failure to explain what they were talking about. Instead, all opted to create a mood rather than conveying a message.

This tactic that works well if you are advertising something that needs no explanation like a luxury car, or an item that is so generic that associating essentially unrelated moods is your only hope of being memorable. Unfortunately, it works less well when you need to explain something as complex as GNU/Linux.

When the average person doesn't even know what an operating system is, what are they likely to get from the winners? That there is something called Linux that is free (the winner) or highly adaptable and evolved (the first runner up), and that it can magically free computers from viruses (the second runner up). None of this is particularly useful information for someone who wants to know what the ads are about.

From the first two, the audience might not even guess that computers were involved. That is not the problem with the third, but it leaves watchers wondering what the giant penguin has to do with anything. Possibly, they might catch the final reference to Windows and Apple, but the second runner up still leaves them to conclude for themselves that an alternate operating system is being referred to. Many, I suspect, won't have the knowledge to do so.

Other entries suffered from at least one of the same problems. The ones that showed flashes of originality, like "Linux and the Blues" failed to explain, while those that tried to explain, like "Why Linux is Awesome" not only failed to do so, but, in their efforts to be original, ended up being simply bizarre.

Looking through the entries, I was reminded forcibly of the time when I was doing advertising for a company, and passed off designing the monthly print magazine spread to a committee because I was busy helping the company lawyer on bundling deals (it was a very small company). The results were -- well, "mixed" would be the politest word. For all that everybody likes to denigrate advertising, producing an effective ad is never easy, and most of those who have never done it can only respond in muddled cliches in their first efforts.

Strangely, neither the winners nor any of the entries reflect the sponsor. The Linux Foundation being a non-profit assocation consisting largely of corporate members, I would have expected the winners to talk more about business advantages rather than software freedom. In fact, if they had, they might have set themselves an easier task of explaining, and been more successful.

As things were, for all the talk of freedom, few entrants bothered to submit their work in a format that could actually be played by free software. Whether the Flash entries would play in Gnash was hit or miss, and few bothered to submit an Ogg Theora version. This lack made the messages in the entries seem somewhat insincere.

Such judgments may seem harsh. But remember that the contest was specifically framed as a response to professional advertising from Apple and Microsoft. Under these conditions, it makes sense to judge the contest entries by the standards of what you are competing against. Besides, to lower your standards is condescending and creates a false sense of accomplishment in those you are judging.

I wish I could be more enthuastic about this experiment. But, as much as I regret the conclusion, the contest failed to produce a thoroughly professional ad, or one that is really usable. Enthusiasm is all very well, but it also takes skill for amateurs to produce quality results -- something that the free software community itself has proved many times over.

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