We determined that our campaign audience was digital natives between 18 and 30, who: tend to value convenience over safety; are driven by individuality and validation; and focus on the short-term over the long-term. So we began with a focus group with a broad range of students from the University, to understand more about how and why they post on social platforms. We also wanted to find out how aware they (and their friends) were of the unintended consequences of their online actions. The challenge was understanding the baseline level of understanding and attitude towards their digital footprint to determine how we might best drive a shift in behaviour.

We also conducted desktop research to uncover relevant reports, current discussions and real-life examples that would help us gain a good understanding of opinions on the topic of an individual’s digital footprint. The key insight we drew from this combined research was that whilst many of our audience were reasonably savvy about the online world, they weren’t necessarily thinking about the long term consequences of things they post today. This insight led us to propose a strategy around increasing awareness and understanding of possible impacts of online behaviour.

We developed the creative concept ‘If you might regret it, forget it’ – which was centered around providing students with a good decision-making mechanism to make them think ahead to the consequences, rather than only thinking about the here and now. We created storyboards for a series of short TikTok videos where a student tells the story of the time they made a digital footprint error. We represented two scenarios:

1. The accidental nude: A student tells the story of how her boyfriend sending her a nude led to the embarrassing snap being accidentally shown to her grandparents.

 

2. The online rant: A student tells the story of how his series of videos trolling food delivery services came back to bite him in a future job interview.

 

When setting the art direction for filming, we wanted to make sure the visual style appealed to a Gen Z audience. So we chose a relaxed and natural style with soft and partial light, featuring homely/familiar backgrounds and with the narrator talking directly to camera before and after their story unfolds.

We provided our client with a campaign toolkit, explaining how the creative concept should be brought to life through film, along with a campaign lockup we created in the University’s existing brand style. The University’s in-house video production team then shot and produced the videos.