The safety of our children online is one of the biggest challenges of our era.
For decades, British society has used various strategies and campaigns to help keep children safe: “Stranger danger”, “Charley Says” and “Stop, Look and Listen”.
Since the arrival of the internet and with the proliferation of mobile devices, parents are faced with a new and growing danger. The internet is full of usefulness and magic, but it also brings an assortment of dangers into one, easily accessible place.
Parents feel confused by the ever-evolving online world (and their kids know more about it than they do). Children have a lot of access to the web, and increasingly it’s private access: 51% of parents of 8-11-year-olds don’t use parental controls. Meanwhile, most digital social spaces don’t verify their users and self-regulation is a farce.
Ensuring that our children can enjoy the web safely is one of the biggest challenges of our era. We needed an equally effective mnemonic for the 21st century.
Be Share Aware – a new mnemonic to teach our children
We devised a simple, memorable instruction: “Be Share Aware.” It was broad enough to cover a range of online behaviours, from sharing information about yourself to sending photos. Share Aware empowers both children and parents. It enables parents to protect their children and enables those children to protect themselves when their parents aren’t watching.
The launch film, I Saw Your Willy, centred on a boy, Alex, who found that sharing photos can have serious consequences. This was followed two weeks later by
Lucy and The Boy, a story about a girl who assumed the person she met online was who he said he was. Using the different genders meant that every parent had a film to which their child could relate.
Naturally, sharing is at the heart of the idea; the films were designed for sharing both digitally and in the real world. They were created to trigger parent/child conversations, using a medium both generations felt happy sharing.
I Saw Your Willy generated a huge amount of attention, with the most popular tweets saying: “Have you seen Alex’s willy?” and “See Alex’s willy then show it to your kids” – all using the hashtag #shareaware to enable people to join the conversation.
If parents wanted to know just how to get Share Aware, they could also access a whole new set of resources online with Net Aware: a straightforward, no-nonsense advice hub that untangles the web and shows parents how they can be just as great a parent online, as they are offline.
Share Aware got shared
The initial Facebook video post reached more than 2 million people on launch weekend. Half of these were reached organically – without paid media support – showing just how shareable the content was. The campaign has had a total of 65m social impressions, helped by a huge amount of celebrity support on Twitter.
It’s also creating lasting change: teachers use the videos in schools; police forces are using them in local campaigns; two leading children’s platforms have overhauled security. Every day another parent starts a conversation and another child is
safer.
It’s easy to shock, horrify or demonise the enemy. It’s much harder to walk a line between light and dark and do so in a way that is highly engaging and has profound impact. Share Aware enables children to explore and enjoy all the magic of the web, but to do so safely. Simply, this is the “Stop Look and Listen” for the YouTube generation.
Beri Cheetham is executive creative director at Leo Burnett
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