Whatsapp was the essential private messaging platform for over 2.5 billion users around the world. But when they rolled out a new Terms of Service without properly explaining the changes, mass paranoia ensued and skepticism around WhatsApp’s ability to read messages led to a global fallout among users. After a year of reclaiming privacy credibility in key markets that depended on WhatsApp’s privacy every day, we set our sights on the one market that posed the most unique challenge; Apple’s dominance in the US privacy conversation. Although WhatsApp was a global powerhouse, it was far lesser known in the United States, so we needed to find a way that not only entered this new market as a credible player in privacy, but dethroned the king too.

We set out to cast a seed of doubt on America’s complacency with the privacy of their SMS messages by bringing the state of their privacy to life using a powerful metaphor: that their SMS messages are as private as sending open letters in the mail and hoping no one would read them.

Our goal was to remind them that even though only 5.5 million SMS messages are sent every day (roughly 6% of all iMessages) like open mail, if they don’t always have privacy, they don’t have privacy.

We set out to cast a seed of doubt on America’s complacency with the privacy of their SMS messages by bringing the state of their privacy to life using a powerful metaphor: that their SMS messages are as private as sending open letters in the mail and hoping no one would read them.

Our goal was to remind them that even though only 5.5 million SMS messages are sent every day (roughly 6% of all iMessages) like open mail, if they don’t always have privacy, they don’t have privacy.

In an activation film, we hired a delivery person to deliver opened letters across America to real people and captured their reactions as they came face to face with a clear violation of their privacy before unveiling the parallel back to their SMS messages.

Knowing that 5.5 billion sms messages are sent every day for iMessage users, we then showed them that even if messages are only sent as sms messages once in a while, there’s always a chance it could be the one message they would never have wanted to get exposed to hackers and put those messages out in the world to make the threat hit close to home.

We launched the campaign during the 2022 AFC championship game and saw a 7X spike in downloads on the same day. Across the duration of the campaign, however, the brand saw a gain of 2M monthly active users from Jan 28 - April 4. But ultimately, the perception of WhatsApp as a private messaging platform, which was the primary goal of the campaign, saw a 7% lift overall.