MANILA — Out of 28 teams of young digital professionals, a pair from Ace Saatchi & Saatchi emerged to take the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines (IMMAP) Cyber Competition crown and with it, the right to represent the Philippines in the Cyber Young Lions contest at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity in June 2018.
Samantha Teaño and Lea Valenzuela emerged as the winning team with their campaign, entitled “Project Unfriend”.
The brief for this year’s competition is to create a campaign to raise awareness and engagement about Cyber Safety. It should make teenagers and young people understand the importance of being responsible with their online activity to avoid encounters with pornography, pedophilia, sexual harassment, cyber-bullying, online to offline crimes, and online abuse. The topic of the brief is in line with IMMAP’s long-term advocacy on Cyber Safety. The winning campaign will also be implemented by the IMMAP.
This year, the jury was led by jury president Donald Lim, Chief Executive Officer, Dentsu Aegis Network Philippines and composed of members Jake Tesoro, Executive Creative Director, FCB Manila; Kenneth Lingan, Country Head, Google Philippines; Joey David-Tiempo, Executive Creative Director, NuWorks Interactive Labs; Karen Alday, AVP, Digital Marketing Head, Nestle Philippines; Bogey Bernardo, Creative Director, Vitamin B; and Jason Drilon, Head of Build & Innovation, Havas Ortega.
The judges were impressed with several entries, citing innovative executions on social media like the use of chatbots, photo filters as a kind of watermark, mass personalisation of Facebook ads, and others.
“The top five itself, all of them, have different ways of approaching the brief. Some just made a mobile app, some just created a bot, some really went for the big idea, so more about habit, more about usage, more about behavior,” jury president Donald Lim shared.
Lim also cited the top factors the jury considered in selecting the winners — feasibility of implementation and scalability, simplicity of idea, and a solid and foolproof use of technology.
Ultimately, the judges looked at campaign feasibility and chose Teaño and Valenzuela’s work for its simple yet solid idea and its well thought out insight. The Saatchi duo zeroed in on the insight that young teenage girls accept Facebook friend requests without knowledge of who the person is because of their belief that a higher number of contacts on the social media platform means they have a wide circle of friends. From the insight arose the idea of “Project Unfriend”, a campaign which will make use of a “fake” stranger account that will send friend requests to the target audience. During the Cybersecurity Awareness Month in September, it will be revealed that the “fake” account is actually part of the campaign and will then educate the audience on cybersecurity.
“It was anchored on Facebook and the creation of fake accounts, inviting the target market to become friends. I think that is so real in this day and age. A lot of our younger audience, they actually add friends without really knowing the person, without understanding the risks,” remarked Lim. “I think the winning entry put that in motion and we can actually activate it. [The campaign] can go across different target markets, anyone can execute that, anyone can be a victim, anyone can also be part of that advocacy and helping propagate that cause,” he added.
On Teaño and Valenzuela’s part, the insight was the hardest part of the process to pin down. The pair dove deep into the psyche and online behaviours of the target audience.
“Since it’s (the target audience) very broad, we decided we’ll pin it down to 14 to 16 year old girls. We had to learn about our target market and more than that, understand their journey and what makes them behave like that online,” Teaño shared. During the process, Teaño and Valenzuela found that indeed, young girls readily accept friend requests even if they do not know the person. “When you’re young, your concept of friendship is quantity over quality. The more friends you have, the cooler you feel, the more popular you become so that’s what feeds your ego,” Teaño said of the insight.
“‘Project Unfriend’ is a social media movement targeted to young girls ages 14 to 16 years old and it’s to stop from befriending anyone online, because that’s the problem. Kailangan lang talaga nila maging mindful. They’re not aware of the risks they’re exposed to,” Valenzuela explained. “How can we reach them without being that person na pinapagalitan mo lang. We want to be in their environment – where else kung hindi sa Facebook,” she added.
To further prepare the teams for the competition, the IMMAP partnered with the Certified Digital Marketing Program to give five talks and workshops on ideation, human-centered design, customer experience, omnichannel approach, and value proposition. The briefing and whole-day workshop was held at the NuWorks Interactive Labs office.
“It was very helpful that we had the workshop because it guided us through the brief and how we will use the available data to us and how we will come up with an insight and bring out the big idea from there,” Valenzuela said.
The IMMAP Cyber Competition was first held in 2016, with James Mendoza and Wacky Torres of Ogilvy & Mather Philippines as the winners and Philippine representatives to the Cannes Cyber Young Lions competition.
