One Shining Moment
Norton hits a three-pointer with college basketball tournament campaign on Yahoo! Mobile
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.”
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.
— Jeff Hecox
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[...] You also have the option to combine your mobile campaign with a PC frontpage campaign, creating a consistent advertising experience across devices, building frequency and extending your reach to create instant awareness and drive responses—no matter where your customers are. For more information on what can be achieved with a Mobile homepage takeover, please read this case study on Norton security software. [...]