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Symantec’s Norton Antivirus goes viral

By 04/10/2010Online Marketing2 min read

It’s strangely ironic to say that an antivirus product has gone viral, however that is what has happened with Symantec’s Norton Internet Security suite for 2010. How did this happen? Well, Norton, a name synonymous with internet security, also holds connotations of being old, boring and pre-web 2.0. I mean, do you know anyone who uses Norton these days? Last I remember using Norton was at least 8 years ago, and I’m really not that old.

kimbo-slice-norton 2010

Yes street fighter Kimbo Slice is also involved.

So what happened? How did Norton go viral? Simply put, a series of brilliant videos for the ad campaign guaranteed that Norton would be the talk of town at water coolers in offices around the world. That’s the brilliance of managing to go viral, as we’ve seen before with Old Spice and Dyson. If you watch any one of these ads, even if you are no fan of Norton’s, you will appreciate their humour and how well crafted and engineered to become instant internet memes they are. And what’s best about them is that they feature David Hasselhoff and a certain phrase about the ‘Hoff. And 80’s metal band Dokken. Enjoy the whole series below.

This first video is a series of these ads, some of which have alternate endings, called ‘Allow’ and ‘Deny’ according to the outcome. The clips’ titles are:
1) Bank of Nikolai
2) S.O.L.
3) Cyber Hunting
4) Chicken vs. Dokken (Allow)
5) Chicken vs. Dokken (Deny)
6) Caterpillar vs. Kimbo (Allow)
7) Caterpillar vs. Kimbo (Deny)

Another video in the series features action movie star Dolph Lungren, who has just sealed his fame in the star studded the Expendables. In these clips, he combats a Unicorn. No kidding:


And finally, the David Hasselfhoff’s videos. Here we go Hoff:


Mark Debono

Author Mark Debono

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