In Canada, one in three kids have experienced some form of bullying. That’s one of the highest in the world. Every year, technology further enables school bullies to extend their torment outside of playgrounds, meaning that their victims have few places to escape.

With little or no media budget, we were tasked with engaging influencers with this important message.

Our experience of working in cause-related categories demonstrably shows that action and reaction amongst those we are targeting is far greater amongst those who have had personal experience of it. That would make targeting adults with a message about the relatively modern phenomenon of online bullying even trickier.

Added to that, the most popular ‘influencers’ in Canada are inundated with both commercial and not-for-profit requests to get involved in media campaigns.

We decided that giving influencers a taste of what online bullying feels like would be the core of our media strategy.

The strategy came to life through three different steps, leveraging data and the power of retargeting:

we sent out an email to CSSN’s network of influencers regarding an upcoming anti-bullying event. Within it, we placed a pixel on the RSVP page a few weeks in advance to give us a hyper qualified target pool. Once they clicked, we were trapped; they were “cookied”.

Days later, our target became the victims. They saw messages such as “You are ugly” and “Your life is a joke.” everywhere. These ads had no frequency cap. Our influencer ‘victims’ saw as many as 60 bully ads on a given day. The messages became more and more intense as the frequency of exposure increased…Until our cyber bullying experiment was revealed to the influencers.

Our influencer “victims” then quickly shared their bullying experience with their followers. That’s how our message reached millions of Canadians

The strategy to use programmatic to ‘bully’ those who could spread our message for us really paid off.

- The campaign greatly impacted our “victims”: 83% of all targeted bloggers and influencers shared their experience through their blogs. The campaign generated an astonishing 23 million earned impressions – in a country of 30 million people.

- Click through rates on our ads were as high as 14% (the category average is 0,01%)

- Finally, donations to CSSN increased by 37% from the previous year – more than three times the objective set before campaign launch!

All of this was only possible by a campaign that broke ‘the rules’ and through sheer passion for the cause, ran roughshod over the media politics and policies that usually come as standard.