Firefox: We’re not an advertising machine

Firefox is nothing like Google Chrome, but this is a plus, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO of Mozilla, tells Marketing.

“Not to say Google’s bad because they are not, they have good products, but one of our values is that we are not Google,” starts Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, the not-for-profit internet company.

“We are not a big advertiser, so we make different decisions on behalf of users.”

We are not a big advertiser, so we make different decisions on behalf of users.

Having spent more than two decades doing marketing for tech giants such as Yahoo, Microsoft and BitTorrent, Kaykas-Wolff joined Mozilla, the owner of the Firefox web browser, two years ago to lead the internet company’s global marketing strategy and organisation.

He was quick to recognise Mozilla needed a different take – in terms of both product development and marketing – from its competitors.

“We can’t compete with them (rivals such as Google and Microsoft) head to head or they will win,” he explains.

“Microsoft has more than 100,000 staff, and as a 1100-people company, we can’t do everything they are doing. We have to be different.”

We can’t compete with them (rivals such as Google and Microsoft) head to head or they will win.

The smaller scale company focuses on a niche, but powerful market.

Drawing references from recent research that Mozilla did, he says for somewhere between 3.2 to 3.6 billion of the internet population, they sized 20% to 22% – around 750 to 950 million people – as conscious choosers, in which these people care about the purpose of brands, security and privacy on the internet, and “kind of carry a Millennial mindset”.

“They generally are younger, make a little more money, live in dense areas, and this group of people is growing faster than the rest of other parts of the internet. Their characteristics mean they will be influential buyers and influential changers of other trends,” he says.

“It’s not the norm yet, but it’s becoming more of a trend; as a marketer I see the need to start talking to the conscious choosers and provide values that are meaningful.”

With its background as a not-for-profit marketing organisation, the company chooses to differentiate its product by developing trust with customers, and because of that, it has to make different decisions about the technology it uses.

“The types of technology we use and produce have to focus on building trust with our customers than purely raw growth,” he says.

Taking programmatic buying as an example, which is the company’s biggest direct marketing spend, he says that when the team uses a DMP (data management platform) to aid media buying and optimisation, it makes sure the DMP can’t share the team’s data into the data exchange and it doesn’t retain customers’ data either.

The team also refrains from using practices such as re-targeting as well.

Some of the marketing materials that Mozilla uses to communicate their values.

Another example is its recently launched “Firefox Focus browser”, an app that aims to be the secure browser for smartphones.

The browser comes with built-in ad tracker blocking, analytic tracker blocking as well as social tracker blocking, all of which highlight Mozilla’s focus on privacy-centred mobile products as part of its new growth strategy.

“Ad-blocking is a hot topic because it would seem like it’s attacking the advertising industry, but I don’t think that’s the real reason this technology exists,” he says.

Ad-blocking is a hot topic because it would seem like it’s attacking the advertising industry, but I don’t think that’s the real reason this technology exists.

“For growth-minded companies, collecting customer data for the sake of collecting data is more risk than the rewards can usually justify.

“The truth is, when you think your customers are exposed to two or three (programmatic) technologies, there are 75 different technologies showing up on a website.

“There are tens if not hundreds of technology you have to load – to track things, to connect your DP data – and it slows down the entire experience. That’s a performance issue on the internet right now.”

That's a performance issue on the internet right now.

When customers turn on an ad-blocker, it’s a signal that there is a bad ad or an offensive ad or they have had a previous bad experience on the site, he suggests.

“We as marketers get the responsibility to listen first. Now that the collection tools on the internet create expensive overheads and risks that are impacting the trust of our customers in a negative way, we should be looking for ways to collect less data and go lean.”

The privacy-first approach has so far proved to be the right move for Mozilla. Since its launch in December 2012, Firefox Mobile for Android has clocked more than 175 million installations.

With an Android version of Firefox Focus released last month, and the launch of Firefox Focus for iOS in November 2016, Kaykas-Wolff sees mobile as an important end for development.

Desktop browser, however, continues to grow as a market. With new technologies such as virtual reality and augment reality, he says there is a need to provide better engines in the platform; so “the biggest release maybe in the history of Mozilla” is happening at the end of this year, he says.

How Mozilla has been performing.

To communicate the message to the conscious choosers is yet another difficult task. Starting in late May this year, Kaykas-Wolff took an aggressive approach to launch the campaign, “browse against the machine”, which convinces users to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox through a series of online visuals and articles.

The renewed position outlines five of Firefox’s biggest advantages, including how Firefox uses less memory than Chrome; how it provides users more control over data and privacy; that Firefox is independent; that the browser isn’t developed by the largest advertising company in the world, but instead, by a “non-profit organisation whose mission is to preserve a healthy web in part by keep corporate power in check”.

“We’ve marketed Firefox as ‘the independent choice’ for the last several years, but we didn’t say who we’re independent of,” he says with a smile.

“Now we’re saying that we’re independent of different things, and we’d like the users to try our product again.”

It does not necessarily mean Firefox has to steal every user from Chrome.

“If we have positive market share growth, that (the brand refresh) would be successful,” he says.

“What’s important for us is we’re seeing good performance, so we know that you can market in a way that is ethical. You can perform well in a way that you respect users.”

Read also: Mozilla CMO: Don’t get lost in technology 

This story appeared in the Marketing Magazine Hong Kong July issue as: Firefox not an advertising machine