Canadian Safe School Network 12 Awards

Bully Ads

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Provided Services
Goal
The Canadian Safe School Network (CSSN) asked us to help them raise awareness around the worrying growth of online bullying. The campaign also needed to increase donations by at least 10%. Without these donations, CSSN cannot pursue it mission of making our school and communities safer for our kids.

The intimidation paid off

influencers shared their experience through their blogs
83%
donations to CSSN increased by
37%
million earned impressions
23M

L'insight

In Canada, one in three kids have experienced some form of bullying. That’s higher than the U.S. and one of the highest in the world. Every year, technology further enables school bullies to extend their torment outside of playgrounds, meaning that their victims have few places to escape.

With little or no media budget, we were tasked with engaging influencers, activists and press outlets with this important message.

Our experience of working in cause-related categories demonstrably shows that – regardless of the message/issue - action and reaction amongst those we are targeting is far greater amongst those who have had personal experience of it. That would make targeting adults with a message about the relatively modern phenomenon of online bullying even trickier.

Added to that, the most popular ‘influencers’ in Canada are inundated with both commercial and not-for-profit requests to get involved in media campaigns.  What could we do to get them talking about our low budget message?

That’s when we decided that giving influencers a taste of what online bullying feels like would be the core of our media strategy.

Intimidate Influencers
We believed that our influential target audience would be more inclined to take actions against bullying if we could make them feel what bullied victims feel. Retargeting banners ads already behave like cyber bullies: They relentlessly follow you everywhere you go. Therefore, we used that same retargeting ad strategy to send hostile messages to influencers. The strategy made them feel what it feels like to be bullied first hand.
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Cookie retargeting

We used one of the most reviled media targeting techniques, cookie retargeting – those ads that follow you around the internet trying to sell you sneakers you looked that ONE TIME - for good.

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Broke all the frequency rules

Secondly, we’d break all the frequency rules of online media – enhancing the bullying effect by uncapping the number of times our target influencers saw our messages.

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Be anonymous

And finally, our ads wouldn’t be emotional messages with the Canadian Safe School Network logo and a call to action on them.  They would be obtuse, personal, in-your-face and would have no brand logo or message to indicate where they’d come from.

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The strategy came to life through three different steps, leveraging data and the power of retargeting:

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Trap the influencers

We sent out an email to CSSN’s network of influencers, activists and PR regarding an upcoming anti-bullying event. Within it, we placed a pixel on the RSVP page a few weeks in advance to give us a hyper qualified target pool. Once they clicked, we were trapped; they were “cookied”.

Recreate the intimidation

Days later, our target became the victims. We targeted Canada’s most popular influencers over and over with hostile ad banners, with messages such as “You are ugly” and “Your life is a joke.” These ads had no frequency cap. Our influencer ‘victims’ saw as many as 60 bully ads on a given day, recreating the inescapable feeling some kids experience every day. The messages became more and more intense as the frequency of exposure increased…Until our cyber bullying experiment was revealed to the influencers.

Share the experience

Our influencer “victims” then quickly shared their bullying experience with their followers. That’s how CSSN’s prevention message reached millions of Canadian population with little to no budget.
A campaign like this that broke the accepted rules of media targeting mean that finding a willing media partner wasn’t easy. However, AOL – a crusader for online security in its own right - was up for the challenge and a team of tech specialists were put in place to bypass the automated optimization platforms and allow us to deliver our message at the extremely high frequency level required.

A succesful campaign

Festival of Media North America
2017
Festival of Media North America
2017
Best use of Programmatic
Festival of Media North America
2017
Best in Charities
Festival of Media Global
2017
Best use of Programmatic
Festival of Media Global
2017
Best use of Influencers
Festival of Media North America
2017
Best creative use of media
Internationalist
2017
Local Brand or Service in a Local market
Media Innovation Awards
2016
Data-Driven Marketing
Media Innovation Awards
2016
Best use of display

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