Profero Sydney has just launched a great campaign in conjunction with NAPCAN (The National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect) around the issue of cyber-bullying in Australia. SOSO (Smart Online, Safe Offline) Cyber bullying affects real lives is the first campaign to target kids directly, in their language, images and within their social networking environments

What makes this campaign interesting when compared with other activity in this space is 3 key things :-
It’s a joint partnership between Profero and NAPCAN, rather than being a “client/agency” relationship, with both investing time and money into the project
We’re talking directly to the kids to empower them to act and address the issue themselves, rather than trying to work through parents, teachers and authority figures.
We’re trying to create behavioral and social change rather than just telling people cyber-bullying is wrong – we’re targeting the by-standers and those who pass stuff on and showing how they are complicit in the problem – we’re trying to make it socially unacceptable to pass on inappropriate material, much like it became socially unacceptable to let friends drive drunk.

At the heart of the campaign is a YouTube execution designed the look like your average “kid gets teased” cyber-bullying video, that then flips into an educational message about how passing stuff on makes you part of the problem. Whilst this is actually a YouTube channel, it is designed to look like standard “watch page”, complete with a faked watchpage URL, with the hope that kids will pass it on to their friends as a prank. This was all done in close collaboration with YouTube, although we comprehensively pushed the limits of what was allowable, having to get all sorts of special permission from the big dogs out of the US.

We also created a game called Web Warriors (www.webwarriors.com.au) that was a deeper education piece around what constitutes cyber bullying in it’s various forms across email, mobile, social media and chat. This was also designed to allow kids to “Stand Up against Cyber Bullying” and be counted, giving a voice to the currently silent majority of kids who hate cyber-bullying. This aspect is enhanced by the ability to “twibbon” your Twitter account, or put the Web Warrior badge on your profile pic for uploading to social networking sites, hopefully starting a groundswell of supporters against cyber bullying. You can also add a widget that features your custom created avatar, and counts up the total Web Warriors, to the social media platform of your choice.

The campaign is supported by an online media campaign of banners and buttons, some of which utilise a similar mechanic of getting people to vote or “contribute” to the problem before educating them about the fact that they are part of the problem. Others simply have kids talking about the problem.

The campaign has already picked up a fair amount of press since it’s launch on Tuesday, including TV coverage, Radio coverage , mainstream news coverage and starting to feature in the blogging world, particularly parenting blogs

All the campaign assets, links to other coverage, etc. can be found here

Posted in: Advertising, Australia, Creativity, Education, Gaming, Social Media |