Norton/Symantec Case Study: Generating Awareness During March MadnessPublished: September 2009 | By Yahoo! and Norton/Symantec
According
to sports pundits, “defense wins championships.” This maxim is often
true for the annual championship tournament of college basketball,
commonly known as “March Madness.”
The security software leader
Symantec plays a different type of defense, but one that is no less
vital to its legions of fans and customers. Over the years, the
company’s Norton products have built a legacy similar to those of
college basketball powerhouses like UCLA and North Carolina.
During
the 2009 tournament, Norton promoted a free trial of its new product,
Norton™ Internet Security 2009, targeting Yahoo!’s highly engaged mobile
audience. The goal of the campaign was to generate awareness of
Norton’s performance improvements, and to capture email addresses to
build its opt-in database. Like a Final Four “Cinderella” team, Norton’s
mobile campaign far exceeded expectations, and provided important
learnings for future promotions.
Going Mobile
Norton’s
marketing team drew up a strategy to target heavily wired, technically
proficient, early adopters. By informing them of the prowess of Norton’s
product enhancements and its numerous industry awards, these groups
could in turn influence and make recommendations to their friends and
families.
The college basketball tournament, with its largely
male and tech-savvy audience, was the perfect event for the campaign.
Norton worked with Yahoo! and crafted a plan to serve as the exclusive
sponsor of Yahoo!’s March Madness mobile experience, including targeted
media on the Yahoo!’s mobile homepage and on Yahoo! Sports.
“We
recognized that this was a great way to have a presence on an early
adopter platform like mobile,” says Morgan Hudson, Senior Manager of
Consumer Marketing, at Symantec. “Mobile played extremely well with our
target audience.”
The Final Score:
Successful on
many levels, Norton’s first-ever mobile campaign leveraged the broad
interest in March Madness and generated tremendous mobile reach in a
short period of three weeks. Yahoo! Mobile’s target audience was highly
engaged with both the content and the Norton brand, generating more than
22 million impressions that resulted in more than 80,000 clicks and a
substantial number of users who offered their email address for future
marketing efforts. The large reach of Yahoo!’s dedicated mobile
tournament web site generated instant awareness of Norton products. On
days when no games took place, impressions naturally decreased;
interestingly on these days, users were more responsive to Norton’s
call-to-action.
“We saw traffic spikes whenever the games were
going on,” says Hudson. “It’s an inherently great time to be advertising
on a mobile device because people are checking scores when they can’t
see the games. During the three-week tournament, there is a lot of
intense attention paid to mobile—it provides instant gratification in
terms of staying up-to-date on the games.”
In the end, Yahoo!
provided three times the number of impressions that were promised to
Norton. “From a straight click-through perspective, it was far and above
anything we had ever seen from our banner advertising,” says Hudson.
“Yahoo! over-delivered on the impressions and provided great
click-through rates, and the icing on the cake was the number of users
who opted to provide their email addresses for future campaigns.”
Norton/Symantec Case Study: Generating Awareness During March Madness
Lessons Learned:
Hudson
compares the mobile advertising environment to the Internet of 10 or 15
years ago: “Because mobile is limited to a static environment with no
rich media, you have to crystallize your message and make it impactful.
You almost have to think about it like an outdoor billboard, and make
every word count.”
It also helps to be wearing the right
“uniform,” Hudson explains: “Our yellow and black colors stood out in
the mobile environment—they’re bold, in your face and recognizable. It’s
also very important to have a compelling offer, or at least something
you can fulfill for prospects.”
Like a team that gets a taste of
winning a championship and wants to come back for more, Norton’s
marketing group is considering a return to the Mobile Madness. Says
Hudson: “We’ll definitely go back to mobile if we have more resources. I
would consider this campaign a success.”
About Norton: Symantec’s
Norton products protect consumers from traditional threats with
anti-virus, anti-spyware and phishing protection. Symantec is a global
leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions
to help consumers and organizations secure and manage the
information-driven world.
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