2015 Gold IT and Telecommunications

Table19

Internet Matters

Protect their Curiosity

The Team

Graham Wall - Executive Creative Director, Datch Datchens - Senior Copywriter, Reuben Mychaleckyj - Senior Art Director, Mailie Lee - Producer, Sarah Cobb - Business Director, Matt Broekhuizen - Managing Director, Emma Clark - Executive Planning Director, Price James - Director,

Contributors

Agile Films - Film Production, Kerve - Digital Production

Campaign overview

With the rise of smart internet-ready devices, more and more children are going online unsupervised, and stumbling across inappropriate content that they find distressing.

Internet Matters, a newly- established body, successfully brought the issue to the attention more than a million parents and showed them how to easily set up parental controls to protect their kids.

Strategy

Internet Matters knew that parents were aware of online dangers to their children but didn’t know how to combat them.

The campaign sought to show how easy it is for children to unwittingly find inappropriate content; but also how easy it is to set parental controls that allow a child to use the internet safely as a place for learning and exploration.

Rather than using typical shock or scare tactics, which could frighten parents off allowing their children to use the internet altogether, the campaign instead looked at curiosity: a natural part of growing up that no parent would ever want to stifle.

Importantly, the campaign also avoided blaming children in any way for what they stumble across online. Instead, it focused on the distress they suffer in such situations and appealed to parents’ natural desire to protect their children from this.

Creativity

Each video focused purely

on a child’s face from start to finish. An overlaid wireframe animation allowed the viewer to see the search or conversation the child was involved in without distracting from the distress on their face. Simple sound design drove the story along and subtly dramatised the dangers shown on screen: abuse from gamers, a search for “Pirates” leading to a violent video, a private photo going public.

Copy at the end shoed how innocent online activity can ‘turn bad in just one click’, with a call to action for parents to protect their children. In just 30 seconds, the dangers lurking online and the importance of parental controls were brought to life without showing a single webpage.

To make each video stand out even more, parents were targeted in relevant advertising spaces: a video about a YouTube search was shown as a YouTube pre-roll, while a ‘sexting’ text conversation was shown as an Apple iAd on iPhones and iPads.

Results

The campaign spread quickly, with the videos discussed on breakfast TV and radio shows and endorsed by politicians. Despite a small budget and little brand awareness, Internet Matters became a talking point across media and social channels, and got parents acting to protect their kids from the online dangers they faced every day.