Cyber-bullying is a growing problem. Suicide is now the #2 cause of deaths among adolescents in Canada. Because it happens online and often out of sight the topic only seems to be discussed after a tragedy happens.

We needed to raise awareness around cyberbullying and drive traffic to the Canadian Safe School Network website where youth, parents and teachers could find resources to help deal with the issue. We wanted to get people talking and learning more about cyberbullying without the impetus of a shocking news story.

The video resulted in an 8000% increase in web traffic to canadiansafeschools.com. The video received over 2.5 million views on YouTube in less than a week and the campaign to date has received over 209 million earned media impressions. The video was also trending in both the #1 and #2 spots on BuzzFeed at the same time.

The video and The Canadian Safe School Network received news coverage from TIME, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, Today’s Parent, ABC News, Elle Magazine, Fox News, Seventeen Magazine, Upworthy, AOL, CBC News, CTV News, The Globe And Mail, The Toronto Star, Cosmopolitan, ESPN, Adweek, Fast Company, Creativity Online and more.

Using the popularity of the Jimmy Kimmel Show’s “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” YouTube segments, we created a parody video that replaced the celebrities with regular kids reading the mean things people said about them online. With a budget of only $250 for digital media we used sponsored posts to give the campaign a small but important initial boost. And we launched the video on YouTube the same week President Barack Obama himself was scheduled to appear in the late night sketch.

The target audience was anyone affected by cyberbulling, specifically youths, parents and teachers. This gave the target a previously unknown asset to help deal with cyberbullying and it gave the client a larger profile to one of the lesser known initiatives under their umbrella.