It’s not often that direct public responses to an advertising campaign can do something as ambitious as change the law. But this is a story of how we did exactly that and how social played a key role in driving action, creating public pressure and ultimately, helping Brook, a sexual health charity for young people in the UK, make cyberflashing (the sending of unsolicited nudes or ‘d**k pics’) illegal.

Rather than an afterthought, social was the glue that held the campaign together and the mechanism that allowed us to harness the public outrage and take it to lawmakers.

There’s a cyberflashing epidemic in the UK. 48% of women, 24% of men aged 18–24 and 76% of girls under 18 yrs have been cyberflashed with the issue “disproportionately affecting women and girls” (UN Women UK) and it’s on the rise.

In 2019, incidences of cyberflashing on London trains increased by 94% (British Transport Police). While it’s easily brushed off as distasteful, but harmless, it is incredibly damaging.

‘It can be intimidating, threatening and humiliating. It impacts adversely on women’s everyday lives’ – Professor Clare McGlynn.

But calls for it to be criminalised fell on apathetic ears because ‘cybercrime’ wasn’t seen as ‘real’ crime.

“When thinking about cybercrime, the public are likely to feel it is ‘victimless’ (UK Government) unlike ‘traditional crime’, putting it at risk of becoming another violation of consent that women had to endure.

Our brief was simple. Make cyberflashing illegal in Britain.

The breakthrough for breaking through apathy came when we spoke to victims.

“If they’d done that to me on the street, they would’ve been arrested”- female, 20s.

The damage from cyberflashing wasn’t diminished just because it was on people’s phones. It was just as violating as being flashed in real life (IRL) because it happens on your most personal device.

But while ‘flashing’ someone your private parts IRL was illegal, cyberflashing wasn’t.

So we reframed the issue and took the ‘cyber’ out of cyberflashing. Through highly stylised illustrations of ‘d**k pic’ poses all over London, ‘Never sent without consent’ was designed to force people to make the connection that if it’s illegal to ‘flash’ someone IRL, then it should be illegal online as well.

And we made it unmissable to lawmakers with QR codes strategically placed over intimate areas that would tweet local Members of Parliament (MPs).

Rather than just an afterthought to the campaign, social played two crucial roles right from the start.

Mobilisation

Our target audience were Members of Parliament (MPs) - the people that could actually change the law. And while they didn’t care about advertising campaigns, they did care about public pressure.

For us, that meant Twitter.

90.7% of MPs in the UK had an active twitter account and it was a direct channel where they could be contacted. That became our key call-to-action across all assets, including physical posters, where QR codes took the public to a website that allowed you to tweet your local MPs.

Support

Just because we were driving awareness, we also needed to provide support. As part of the campaign, we launched posts and assets with hard-hitting stats and messages of consent that young women could download and use to reply to unwanted ‘d**k pics’.

We launched the campaign in September 2022 during Sexual Health Week with posters in key centres of influence across London that featured the QR code which mobilised the public to tweet their MPs.

At the same time, we launched a dedicated microsite and a suite of social content that young people could download to use as responses if they were sent an unsolicited ‘d**k pic’.

All our assets featured the hashtag #stopcyberflashing to centralise the public outrage and encourage sharing with bespoke social content pushed out through Brook’s owned social channels.

By Jan 2022, the campaign had caught the attention of Fay Jones MP and with the support of our dedicated mobile Ad Van parked on the parliament green, took the debate to parliament to make cyberflashing illegal.

We saw an 299% increase in social mentions of cyberflashing and related terms between Sept-21 to Mar-22, compared to the previous year.

Brook became a leading voice in conversation with everyone from student unions to sex toy companies retweeting our content and spreading the word.

We knew the campaign had taken a life of its own when MPs were recreating and remixing our social posts demonstrating that it had gotten the right kind of attention.

Of course, at the end of the day, the most important thing was the law.

2 weeks after Fay Jones MP led the debate in parliament, the government bowed to the pressure cyberflashing would be made illegal and perpetrators given a maximum sentence of 2 years imprisonment.