Cannes Lions

SOCIAL BULLETS

AREA 23, AN FCB HEALTH NETWORK COMPANY, New York / STAND FOR THE SILENT/KAZOO / 2021

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Overview

Background

Kazoo is a personal safety app developed to help families build a safer social media environment. It is in beta phase for a Q3 launch, available to investors, school administrators, and parent influencers. In order to build awareness of the problem and a list of qualified leads for launch, Kazoo partnered with Stand for the Silent, a non-profit that fights all forms of bullying since 2010.

The goal was to get parents to understand the danger their kids experience on social media. Research shows that bullying is the leading cause of teenage suicide in America, and that half of this abuse happens online.

Together, Stand for the Silent and Kazoo decided to create a powerful anti-bullying message while generating qualified leads with concerned parents.

Idea

Social Bullets is an experiment created to show parents the dangers of the internet by replicating 24 hours in a typical American student’s life on social media. Research revealed that for every 233 bullying posts online, one teenager attempts suicide. To show this staggering number to parents, we developed an AI algorithm to track bullying posts and fire real bullets in real time at a shooting range, reflecting the statistical occurrence of suicide attempts by teens.

In 24 hours, our algorithm detected more than 70,000 bullying posts on 4 major social media platforms. Statistically, this represents 300 suicide attempts in one day.

Stand for the Silent presented parents with this tragic reality in virtual educational sessions to build awareness on cyberbullying. These sessions also generated leads for the upcoming launch of Stand for the Silent’s main partner, the Kazoo App, a platform to keep people safe on the internet.

Strategy

We trained an AI on a database of over 2 million human moderated content from social media. With machine learning, our algorithm was able to capture bullying posts from 4 major platforms used by American students, collecting more than 70,000 toxic comments/day. This allowed us to extrapolate that for every 233 bullying posts there is one attempted suicide.

We held special presentations in virtual learning sessions held through local Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings to show the experiment to parents.

These educational sessions via Zoom were hosted by Kirk Smalley, president of Stand for the Silent. He was joined by cyberbullying survivors who shared their own experience to help equip parents to navigate this online world.

Execution

Kazoo is a personal safety app developed to help families build a safer social media environment. It is in beta phase for a Q3 launch, currently available to investors, school administrators, and parent influencers. In order to bring awareness of the problem of cyberbullying and build a list of qualified leads for launch, Kazoo partnered with Stand for the Silent, a non-profit that has fought all forms of bullying since 2010.

The goal was to get parents to understand the danger faced by many kids on social media. Research shows that bullying is the leading cause of teenage suicide in America and that half of this abuse happens online.

Together, Stand for the Silent and Kazoo decided to create a powerful anti-bullying message while generating qualified leads with concerned parents.

We transformed a shooting range into a metaphor for social media. On one end, the dark anonymous hole of the internet. On the other, posters representing real-life targets of hate—teenagers who have suffered one of the 4 most common forms of cyberbullying: culture shaming, body shaming, sex shaming, and grade shaming.

Our algorithm controlled the shooting range. For every 233 bullying posts it detected, the range fired a bullet into a specific poster, representing one attempted suicide, statistically speaking.

We held special presentations in virtual learning sessions for local Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings to show the experiment to parents.

These educational sessions via Zoom were hosted by Kirk Smalley, president of Stand for the Silent. He was joined by cyberbullying survivors who shared their own experiences to help equip parents to navigate this online world.

Outcome

The pandemic brought Stand for the Silent in-person school sessions to a halt. Thanks to Social Bullets and its virtual educational sessions, Stand for the Silent was able to resume its activities and re-engage parents with their cause.

Kazoo gained 2000 qualified leads to be activated upon app launch.

Dozens of parents have signed up for an early access trial, to serve as brand ambassadors in their own communities.

Social Bullets has also helped Kazoo and Stand for the Silent raise awareness and open parents’ eyes to the growing danger of online bullying and its deadly consequences.

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SOCIAL BULLETS

AREA 23, AN IPG HEALTH NETWORK COMPANY, New york

SOCIAL BULLETS

2022, STAND FOR THE SILENT/KAZOO

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