[advocacy-discuss] Advocacy : SuperBowl half-time

[Bill Rushmore]

Ben Rockwood wrote:
> As for the comments of Rick N.... I was in no way suggesting that
> American Football is for less intelligent persons.  The issue is rather
> the cost.  It's widely known that SuperBowl ad time cost is in the
> millions, and yet even more millions to come up with clever ads.  Given
> that Sun's product line is now much lower end than, say, IBM's, will you
> really get bang for your buck?  IBM, for instance is pimping
> multi-million dollar products in its ads, not pSeries rack servers.  If
> an IBM Pentaflop ad results in 10 contacts and that results of maybe 4
> sales its all been worth it.
>
>   

For the record I live in Pittsburgh, a Steelers fan, and would love to 
see an OpenSolaris add during the game (I am also a Formula 1 fan and 
wish Sun still sponsored that as well but that is also big money.) But I 
agree with Ben the cost would probably not be worth it. Way back IBM 
used to advertise OS/2 heavily during American Football games and I am 
pretty sure had a super bowl add as well. I don't think all of those 
adds helped OS/2 much.

My opinion would be if Sun was going to spend that kind of money it 
would be better spent continuing to build a community now rather than 
expensive adds right now. Imagine how many user groups kits and speakers 
could be sent around the World with the price of just one ad. Maybe 
later as we grow but now the grass roots community is key. That's 
something that IBM hardly paid attention to with OS/2.

Bill