As consumers
with limited cash to spend, we make choices every day between the thousands of
services and products vying for our wallets.
And amid the fray & frenzy, those companies and services that offer security, insurance,
or precautionary measures can easily be overshadowed by more tantalizing products. Buying insurance of
any sort seem less urgent than, say, purchasing a new album or a concert
ticket, or replacing your empty tube of toothpaste. You’re not actually getting anything for your money – you’re only paying to avoid things you don’t want. So a major advertising maneuver for security
services is to elaborate (and exaggerate) the damages and disasters that might befall you should you choose to forego their security. In many respects, companies that deal in burglar alarms or flood insurance have it easier -- they can show frightening images of the concrete disasters that they promise to fend off. But if you’re a technological security service, such as Norton by Symantec, it’s much more difficult to put a face on the digital villain. They must figure out how to render technological dangers perceptible to the buying audience -- and how to make those dangers feel not only real, but imminent.
Norton’s
2011 campaign is creative and entertaining, and succeeds in an unlikely
way. Their series of advertisements
consist of a yellow background, with different file names printed in simple type across the
page – .mp3 files, .mov files and .jpg files.
The entire thrust of the campaign lies in the clever file names, which hint at deeply personal content of some kind – content with sentimental value,
historical value, or just potentially embarrassing value, such as "TheMomentSheSaidYes.jpg" (sentimental), “GrandpaDoingTheRunningMan.mov” (familial-sentimental), or “FellAsleepOnTheCouch_AKA_FunWithMagicMarker.jpg” (blackmail-worthy). These file names, while specific and personal
at first glance, are also fundamentally generic – I mean, you may not have a .jpg
of yourself with a magic-marker moustache, but instead you might have a .bmp file of that
time you passed out on Widener Steps in your Halloween costume. Norton hopes that you see the file names and grin, because there's a good chance that you have a parallel file somewhere in the labyrinth of your laptop.
The punchline of the ad comes in the small black print in the bottom left corner of the page: “It’s not just
data. It’s your life.” And that's the sentiment Norton needs to
sell if they want to sell their product.
Norton is marketing aggressively in the intersection of our everyday mediascapes,
technoscapes, and terrorscapes. The
media files that are strangely precious to you (and integral to your identity!) are technological in nature -- and at the same time, they are under threat from menacing technological forces. By subtly (and, in the tagline, overtly) suggesting that your
life and personal history are constituted entirely of data like home movies,
pictures, and sound recordings, Norton markets itself as a hugely desirable digital safeguard.
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