I might have been willing to let this commercial slide from my critical commentary, but unfortunately they show up on a near-daily basis as a YouTube commercial that I have to click my way through, and so it is something I have to hear often. This is not to the benefit of the advertiser. It is not as if there are no good advertisements out there, but there are a lot of ways to get marketing wrong, and McAfee manages to get it wrong in an impressive way that is worthy of discussing in the hope that people will learn from the pitfalls of its marketing effort and send their efforts in another direction.

For those who have not heard the commercial, the commercial begins with a news alert sort of sound effect, with an obviously professional woman saying that everyone deserves to feel safe online, and also offering as an added benefit to McAfee’s usual antivirus system some two million dollars in identity theft protection, some sort of insurance likely designed to compensate people for identity property losses. This particular commercial is designed to be reassuring, but for me as a listener, I take the exact opposite approach to hearing the commercial than it appears to have been designed for.

Leaving aside the question as to what people deserve, which is a thorny matter that has more to do with matters of soteriology, penology, and other theological concerns than with marketing, the commercial starts off on the wrong foot by saying that people deserve to feel safe online. The problem with this is that feeling safe is not good enough. What people ultimately want from their online security is not to feel safe but rather to be safe. The feeling of safety only lasts until the online protection fails and the antivirus system becomes an agent of some sort of virus, turning their computer into a zombie, rather than protecting the computer as it ought to do. If your antivirus or computer security system only makes people feel safe rather than provides genuine safety to them, that system is not worth paying for. Feelings ultimately have little value if they are not grounded in some sort of objective and firm reality. It is admittedly not an easy thing to be safe, but if you cannot offer safety and are not willing to work as hard as possible to provide it and maintain it, you do not deserve to be in the security business.

Given that the commercial had none of the fine print that one would expect from a commercial that was making real claims, one has to turn to the language of the commercial itself, and this leaves the listener with more questions than answers. There are especially a lot of questions about the supposed $2 million coverage for identity theft. How is one to make a claim against this coverage? What does it, in fact, cover for? Does making a claim against this coverage increase the price of one’s future antivirus protection in the way that making claims on home or automobile coverage increases the price of premiums? Who pays out for the coverage and how are their own expenses covered for, if in fact there are a lot of expenses related to identity theft that have to be paid out on? These, and a whole host of other questions, could easily be asked about such coverage, and whether it marks a shift from trying to avoid or prevent identity theft to simply trying to cope with it. If prevention is cheaper than treatment, how are these expenses going to be contained? Someone has to pay for it, after all. Coverage that is too hard to use is not worth selling to the customer, and too much money being paid out would put profitability concerns on McAfee and whoever is underwriting their identity protection insurance, depending on how they are financing it.

These are not the type of questions one wants to generate from a fifteen second commercial that people are hearing over and over again. If the goal of the commercial was to make McAfee seem like a company that knew what they were doing and would be able to help provide for the safety of their customers, the end result was the opposite, leaving listeners to wonder if McAfee knew what they were doing and had abandoned all pretense to actually make people safe and simply operating as an insurance company that seeks to profit off of the margins of people who want security and do not run into any phishing scams or other tricky problems. McAfee seems to be selling the illusion of security, and hoping that it will appeal to those people who do not use the computer often enough or in ways that would actually put them in danger and test the worthiness (or lack thereof) of the company’s claims. Whether or not this is a profitable line of business, I cannot say, but it is certainly not one that inspires any confidence from me.