Mozilla Marketing VP, Paul Kim, announced today that Mozilla has decided to pull back the Fight Against Boredom campaign mainly due to poor response to the video it is centered on.

“There hasn’t been a strong positive response from the Mozilla community to the video that is the centerpiece of the campaign. We don’t plan to spend any more time on this campaign as it’s clear that people aren’t inspired by the video. We’ve learned what we needed to and we will move on to try new things.”, said Paul in a blog post.

The campaign came to an unplanned false start last Monday, when the site FightAgainstBoredom.org went public unveiling a long list of statistics about Firefox and Internet Explorer users. It happened that some of the statistics were found offensive.

In the announcement, Paul notes that none of the statistics were written by Mozilla. Instead, the list was provided by Nielsen Online. The statistics are based on a large demographic sample that is asked on a wide range of aspects of their lives including their browser preference. Then it is possible to compare all other factors between Firefox and Internet Explorer users. Mozilla didn’t ask for health conditions specifically but they happened to be there, probably generated by a computer program.

The site wasn’t meant to be online either as the campaign was never officially launched.

So that’s the short story of Fight Against Boredom. As I said on Monday, I won’t miss it. I think the video would have hurt more than helped. Funny is just not easy.

It is refreshing to see yet another honest decision taken by Mozilla when things didn’t go as expected. I can only imagine how much work must have been put into and aborting it was sure no easy decision.

For those interested, Paul provides links to the video (Rise Up) lyrics and the site images. The video is available on YouTube.