Leo Burnett Australia

Client: The Minderoo Foundation
Product: Captive Content
Title: Walk Free: Captive Content
Media: Online Campaign
Country: Australia
Date Of Campaign: 09 October 2020

Background: Walk Free is a charity organisation fighting against modern slavery. While they have a significant cache in government and industry circles, they have low awareness among an increasingly engaged and interested audience. We were tasked with raising awareness to their newly found statistic that 1 in 130 women and girls currently live in modern slavery. To get this fact in the public eye, bolstering Walk Free’s position in lobbying governments and industry bodies to help eliminate morden slavery was key. While spreading mass awareness about Walk Free and the lives of enslaved women was the core mission, it was also during a period of time saturated with countless other global issues, and so achieving real cut through would mean heavily competing for people’s attention.

Idea: With issues like modern slavery being vastly overshadowed by all the other media we consume, it made sense to capitalise on that popularity rather than fighting directly against it. Rather than competing for people’s attention, we decided to hijack what they were already searching for.We created a series of Youtube videos that resembled some of social media’s most popular content categories, only to later reveal a story speaking about the hidden, pervasive nature of modern slavery. In designing our videos this way, we were able to target people with a message about modern slavery when they were least expecting it. Because of the shared search terms our films had for both the hijacked category and modern slavery, they effectively opened up Youtube’s algorithm to begin suggesting more videos of slavery-related content to every person we reached.

Results: Utilising a small paid media budget of $50,000 AUD, bolstered by the reach of influencers, celebrities and politicians, the Captive Content films reached:- 5.5 million total video views- 20 million impressions - 81% video completion rate for viewers (YouTube average VTR is 45%). - 374% increase in followers for Walk Free’s social platforms- Presented live at the UN to spark real change