2015 Bronze Best Business to Consumer Campaign

Table19

Internet Matters

Protect their Curiosity

The Team
Graham Wall, Datch Datchens, Reuben Mychaleckyj, Mailie Lee, Sarah Cobb, Matt Broekhuizen, Emma Clark, Price James

Contributors
Agile Films - Film Production, Kerve - Digital Production

Campaign overview

With the rise of internet-enabled 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

Parents were aware of online dangers to their children but didn’t know how to combat them.

Internet Matters set out to show how easy it was for children to unwittingly find inappropriate content, but equally how easy it was to set parental controls that allowed a child to use the internet safely as a positive place for learning and exploration.

Rather than use typical shock or scare tactics, which could have frightened parents off allowing their children to use the internet altogether, the campaign instead used 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 showed a child’s face throughout. An overlaid 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 and subtly dramatised the dangers shown on screen: abuse from another gamer, a search for “Pirates” leading to a violent video, an intimate photo going public. A copy sign-off highlighted how innocent online activity can “turn bad in just one click” and asked parents to protect their children. In just 30 seconds, the dangers lurking online and the importance of parental controls were portrayed without showing a single webpage.

Each video was targeted at parents using 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 being 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.

More than 1.2 million people saw the videos in the first two weeks alone, with daily traffic to Internet Matters’ parental control step-by-step guides up 450%.

A two minute average dwell time showed parents were interacting with the site content to learn about protecting their kids online.