The Challenge
“There is increased exposure to violent or sexual content at a younger age, which causes a desensitisation and normalisation, because children’s brains aren’t fully developed to process this in a way that an adult brain can” – BBC Child cybersafety is a major issue. Harmful online content affects the health and safety of children worldwide. In the most extreme and tragic cases, it can even be fatal. The UK and US Surgeon Generals agree that children need protection from damaging online content. Research consistently points to direct causal relationships between online content and suicide ideation, self-harm, anxiety, porn, online bullying, loss of sleep, body dysmorphia and eating disorders. To name a few. Yet historically, Big Tech has either ignored the issue of child cybersafety or provided inadequate protective measures that children can easily bypass. Parents have been in an impossible situation: either give their child a smartphone and put them in danger, or cut them off from useful digital information and socialisation opportunities. With no better option, most parents (61%) do not use parental controls and allow their children to explore the internet - unfiltered and unsupervised - exposing children to harm. Samsung is changing this. For the first time, a Big Tech brand is offering a genuine solution. The Samsung Kid-Safe Range - three phones and six tablets - loaded with effective protective measures that parents need: filtering, alerts, nudity detection and more. The Worst Children’s Library launched this range in New Zealand, ahead of a global rollout.
The Solution
brief: launch Samsung's first child-safe range target: New Zealand parents media budget: zero solution: a school library filled with books that no parent would let their children see. But the internet already did. We searched hundreds of sources to find the worst things children have seen and experienced online, and created over a thousand books, filling a school library - the place children used to go for information. An unprecedented representation of the harm children experience online, designed to shock parents into changing their behaviour. A live product demonstration - to showed parents how the Samsung devices filter the internet, we used projection mapping to make the harmful books disappear. The campaign smashed our objective to achieve awareness - the experience was covered by all major New Zealand news outlets, along with 193 international publications. The Kid-safe Series, following this successful New Zealand launch, is now being rolled out globally.
