The Microsoft Core Web TrueType Fonts were “aggressively marketed” —i.e. bundled with Microsoft products, free. That is why Comic Sans has become a meme, and Impact too, LOLcats style.

It might also be said that Adobe products such as Illustrator and Photoshop are not really graphics niche products—Adobe claimed to have increased the number of graphic artists x25 (in Pamela Pfiffner’s book)—and those products came on CD with a bunch of free fonts.

Thanks.
I think the Microsoft example would be the direction that kind of "aggressive marketing" of fonts would have to come from. I don't imagine a type distributor or major foundry would be putting that kind of energy and resources into promoting a specific font or group of fonts other than the obvious move of pushing their best sellers to the front.

What I do see a more of these days is really, really deep discounts, which is kind of the opposite. A race to the bottom.

A massive burn rate to bump up the user base and dominate market share is pretty common for the dotcom age. But it is not a new phenomenon—that’s how N.W. Ayer financed The Saturday Evening Post in the early days of mass-market magazines.

How “aggressive” has the marketing of Google Fonts been?

"With TV commercials and the like?"

My guess is that most folks who purchase fonts are professionals (graphic designers, etc) so TV advertising wouldn't make sense. Targeted advertising in design magazines and websites would be more logical, and maybe some web ads at popular computer sites.

Google Fonts might be an exception, but I don't recall seeing ads for them.

I think most folks would regard fonts bundled with an application as a bonus, not the main reason to purchase an application.

I would have interpreted the question as being "was there ever a typeface that was aggressively marketed"... and so the bundling of True Type fonts with either the Macintosh OS or with Microsoft Windows would not een have entered my mind.

I certainly don't recall ever seeing TV commercials for Helvetica or Times Roman, and so I would say that the answer is "no".

Even though one could consider bundling Arial as aggressively marketing the typeface as well as the font, and then there are all the Google fonts, or the Gandhi font family as another example.

But a case where the general public has been approached with a view to making money off the typeface afterwards... I can't think of one.

But then, I may not be recognizing all the possible forms that the marketing of a typeface might take. (I know I haven't seen ads for Perpetua in TIME or LIFE or Newsweek either... but I may be missing things far more subtle.)

Since before the era of computers, ordinary people in their homes didn't have phototypesetters or even Selectric Composers, the idea of marketing a typeface to the general public, as I envisage it, would be to create a demand for published materials in that typeface, so as to encourage its sales to the usual suspects.

But that leads to a different tangent: Prestige Elite and Courier are typefaces too, and IBM marketed its typewriters broadly enough at times that they could be said to be addressing the general public. Would that count?

The following definition was approved by the American Marketing Association Board of Directors:

Marketing:
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

It’s about value, not income. Therefore bundling is marketing—as long as it’s not perceived as spamming (although that could be construed as negative value, which is still value). Certainly, Comic Sans has acquired enough value to be notorious.

As someone who works in the information business, I can tell you much of the best and most efficient marketing is that which is based on PR and press relations, rather than advertising.

You can bet that fonts that do get press attention have had major, labour intesive marketing work done with them beforehand. I'm thinking eveything from Ecofont to the recent Doves Type diving recovery operation.

Yes, but I cannot imagine many people actually buying (or using it if they do) Typespec's Doves because, for example, in keeping with the original, it does not have italic, small caps or lining figures. Of course, there are workarounds but . . . and didn't the press coverage have more to do with the story-novelty of diving for it in the Thames than with the face itself . . .

I agree with Johan (Birdseeding), and I think a typeface which massively profited from this kind of marketing is Gotham.

didn't the press coverage have more to do with the story-novelty of diving for it in the Thames than with the face itself
Well you don't catch many fish with a bare hook.

That's how it works, though, you need to judge how the media value news stories and tailor your marketing accordingly. The person who co-ordinated the diving operation was acting out of interest and curiosity, definitely, but it will also help his company sell more copies of the typeface I'm sure, whether through direct clickthroughs or through raising awareness of its existence.

A lot of marketing works this way. The actual story sold to newspapers is rarely the "story" the marketers want out, which is inevitably "here's our new product, please buy it". (A press release written that way, unless the product is exceptionally innovative, will rarely result in more than specialist press coverage.) Instead, the story is modelled to the specifications the media wants, to maximise exposure, and the fallout from that (if correctly designed) will result in increased exposure for the client as well. New York Times writer Rob Walker calls this sort of strategy "murketing" – using indirect stories of no obvious connection a specific product to eventually sell it, being dark and murky about the actual marketing intentions.

Here in Sweden, now-defunct PR agency Studio Total was infamous for this sort of thing. They'd even routinely create fake products and blogs and music releases and whatnot to build up momentum, only to eventually be revealed as something else entirely. I'm not saying font makers work this way, often the story is genuine, but their marketing efforts can work using the same underlying mechanism.

One can indeed consider the recovery of fonts of Doves Type as something to capture the public's imagination, and hence a marketing manouver of sorts; you have indeed captured the subtle things that I felt I was missing.

Perhaps it’s just a different niche market rather than the general public, but the marketing for “dyslexic” fonts targets non-designer end-users—as well as governments and NGOs.

The question was asked:

Yes. And it was the person who asked the question that had an icon/avatar that many considered offensive, so it was assumed that the question was purely a device to get attention for it - that's why the original thread dealt entirely with the politics of that icon, and no one really felt like appearing to support the original poster by getting back to the question - which in the scheme of things was of very minor importance compared to the political issue involved.

But, as this thread has shown, the question really was of some interest in itself.

I agree with Nick, the so-called fonts-for-dyslexics, particularly Dyslexie, have been heavily marketed to a broad audience, garnering considerable mainstream attention.

Where has Dyslexie been advertised?

I'm sure there have been news and blog articles about it, but the original poster seemed to be asking about TV advertising and commercial ads. A search for Dyslexie Advertisement (and similar phrases) didn't turn up any conventional ads.

I doubt if there are any conventional ads for Dislexie, but there is definitely seems to be a conventional word of mouth PR campaign going on. It turns up in articles and those articles are endlessly posted and re-posted on social media - Often by people who should know better, but that's another story. Perhaps there is some money behind that, but I think Dislexie is a freebie, so why would anyone put money into promoting it?

If I recall right, Helvetica has been “aggressively advertised” by the foundry too...

If we can consider what happened with Doves to be "marketing", and I think we can, at least for the purposes of answering the initial question, wouldn't we also have to consider Starling an example of this as well?

Starling

what's the story?

Oh, you hadn't heard? The typeface Starling is based on sketches and patterns by William Starling Burgess plus an original italic and bold... and was created after the claim was presented that Times Roman could have derived, unacknowledged, from the work of Burgess.

Back to the original question, I suppose the answer is “no”.
But it would be fun to imagine a parallel universe with a Ridley Scott-directed 1984 Superbowl ad for Helvetica Neue…

Or where the immense popularity of Comic Sans was attributable to a powerful and iconic ad campaign by Microsoft Bob.

attributable to a powerful and iconic ad campaign by Microsoft Bob.

In that universe, where Microsoft Bob became so successful as to become the standard face of Windows, presumably the people working on Linux would have just given up trying to compete with that - and Linux would have remained a niche operating systems for serious computer enthusiasts, not even trying (i.e. with Ubuntu) to have larger mass appeal.

Linux

What's the story?

:o)