Most Facepalm Inducing Marketing Campaign is From Symantec

Symantec has a ridiculous super-fail teamup contest featuring noted criminal pothead and gunslinger Snoop Dogg. They are running a contest called “hack is wack.” Winner gets snoop tickets and a laptop with Symantec’s resource-crushing processor hog Norton AV installed.

I guess Symantec is trying to tap into the gangsta AV market. Andy Greenberg on Forbes slays these marketing idiots with his piece here, saying:

The cybersecurity industry has an image problem: Antivirus products have all the cultural caché of toilet bowl cleaners. Even infosec vocabulary–words like “cyber,” “hacker,” “spam,” and “computer virus”–seem like frozen relics of the late 1990s.

Now Symantec, with the bizarre cooperation of rapper Snoop Dogg, has put forward what may be the most spectacularly failed attempt to redeem that image in the industry’s history.

The antivirus giant’s “Hack is Wack” campaign launched earlier this week with a video interview of Snoop Dogg endorsing Symantec’s products and a call for user-submitted rap videos about hacking and cybersecurity. In the two days since, a whopping seven videos have been uploaded to the site.

Even this black dude in the yellow suit is embarrassed by this newest campaign.  Gangstas don’t use antivirus.  They don’t even use condoms, yo!  They are too busy keepin’ it real to worry about malware, fool!   Maybe if Snoop was holding a laptop sideways this thing might catch on.  This still isn’t as bad as their corporate theme song.