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Easy access: Motion Sickness help parents monitor online activity

The Government, with the help of Motion Sickness, has created an eye-opening campaign that helps parents protect children from the harms of roaming online.

Bullying, porn, inappropriate content, and grooming are a common occurrence when children are left to freely search the internet. Introducing, ‘Keep it Real Online’ the government aims to provide parents and caregivers the tools, tips, and advice they need to manage online harm.

Executed across four unique videos, photography, print, billboards, and social, the campaign shows different ways young people can be affected by content on the internet. One particular video sees two porn starts at the front door of a home asking to see a young boy named ‘Matt’ who had been watching them online. Matt’s mother ‘Sandra’ is shocked to learn about her child’s online activity and insists on a chat to discuss the difference between online content and reality.

Using light humour to promote a serious message, the campaign has already seen major success since launching. The pornography focused video, has already had 458,000 views on Facebook and more than five thousand shares after only a few days of going live. It has become the number one video on Reddit and has more than 220,000 views on YouTube. The video has also been noticed internationally, with the UK Daily Mail re-sharing.

Motion Sickness creative director, Sam Stuchbury, says the team have been blown away by the response so far.

“Obviously the issues we are tackling within the campaign are sensitive, so to see the campaign land so well with parents has been amazing.

“It’s been a busy few weeks for us, we came up with the full campaign within about four days and then managed to get the campaign live within four weeks of winning the work.  We’re super pleased with the result and response from Kiwis.”

Motion Sickness head of strategy, Hilary Ngan Kee, says there needs to be conversations had across New Zealand about online safety. She says the intent behind the campaign wasn’t just to bring awareness to online issues, but to give parents an ‘in’ for starting what can be quite intimidating or hard conversations.

“In each scenario, our parent is confronted with their worst online nightmare, right on their doorstep. But the most important thing is they stay cool, calm, and collected. The same skills they use in real life, such as open communication and level-headedness, still apply to these new digital issues.

“As Kiwis, we often use humour to help us deal with difficult subjects. In some ways it gives us back the power. If we can laugh at something, then perhaps it’s not so scary, perhaps we can tackle it a bit better than we originally thought we could. It was important to us to include a bit of offbeat humour in our ad creative. The fact we could cast some truly talented NZ comedians was a bonus.”

The campaign is a combined effort by the Department of Internal Affairs, Netsafe, the Office of Film and Literature Classification and the Ministry of Education.

Visible throughout New Zealand, the campaign will be rolling out across TV, OOH, print, social media and wider digital.

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