Description:

Online harm is costing the country $444 million every year.

The average age for seeing online porn for the first time is just 13 years old, skewing a generation’s perceptions of sex. Nearly 40% of Kiwi kids (aged between 9 and 17) said they had spoken to strangers online.

As the country plunged into level 4 lockdown in March 2020, there was an estimated 40% surge in the amount of time young people spent online, mostly unsupervised. This heightened the exposure to bullying, pornography, grooming and other potential digital harm – especially without the safety net of school filters. Compounded by the drastic change in daily life, this ‘new norm’ had the potential to exacerbate feelings of vulnerability, isolation, depression and anxiety. 

These issues are delicate, but many of them are modern issues we’ve shied away from speaking openly about, with few available educational resources for parents and children. 

We needed to confront these online issues in the real world by starting the conversation and providing adequate resources to navigate them. 

Online safety, IRL.

Our task was to raise awareness of online bullying, grooming, pornography and inappropriate content, with the ultimate aim to reduce online harm and inappropriate online behaviour among youth during and after the campaign.
 
Oh – and we had to pitch the full campaign in just four days and if successful get the campaign live in 6 weeks. That meant creating everything from start to finish and getting it approved by five different government agencies, all during varying levels of Covid lockdown. With a complex campaign to execute effectively, this added an extra layer of uncertainty.

We were never going to solve the issues of the online world in two months, however, 'Keep it Real Online' grabbed headlines nationally and internationally, featuring in over 150 articles (and counting), whilst racking up over 35 million views across our campaign videos and being retold in several different languages. The campaign was the catalyst of a global conversation to bring these issues to the mainstream. 

Our decision to use humour as a tool meant that all of a sudden, our nation was comfortable with talking about these difficult topics at the dinner table. Embraced as a true ‘kiwi’ approach, parents and teens alike were drawn to address these issues.

We immediately saw shifts across many of our key goals:

Increased Enquiries: The Light Project, the leading organisation combatting the effects of pornography reported that since the campaign, they have seen a fivefold increase in requests for training, support and resources.

Reduce Inappropriate Online Behaviour Among Youth: The number of blocked searches from school networks dropped from a high of over 350,000 searches a day in early March 2020 (pre-lockdown) to fewer than 1,000 a day in June – July (Level 2 and 1) when the campaign was running.

After the Campaign: Data shows that the safety and security filters used by schools are blocking a steadily declining number of attempts to access pornography