In 2004, the digital frontier was a remote and foreign place for most parents. Their kids, however, true digital natives, had embraced the internet as their own. Online constantly, they had already discovered the communicative powers of the internet; email, chat rooms and IM were booming. The problem was that sexual predators had also discovered the internet and it had opened up a brutally efficient way for them to find and solicit children.
This threat was harshly real for The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) as they noticed a sharp uptick in cyber predators. They estimated that, each year, 1 in 5 children was sexually solicited online. Convinced that parents needed to be made aware of this growing threat, NCMEC approached The Ad Council for help.
Research has consistently shown that the best defense against teenage drug and alcohol abuse is getting parents to talk to their kids about these issues early and often. The same learning applied here with one big problem. Kids had invented a whole new lingo online - BFF, G2G, LOL and, worst of all, POS (parent over shoulder). Parents, still struggling with internet adoption, felt overwhelmed because their kids had become the experts, overnight. How could they start a dialogue when they didn't even speak the language?
The campaign leveraged this language barrier as a way to give parents the vocabulary they needed to start the conversation. It also gave parents the reassurance that they were still the experts in parenting and that the rules of good parenting were exactly the same, despite the fact that the medium had changed.
"So often public service advertising belabors the obvious, soft pedals the message or tilts at windmills. Not here.......The Internet doesn't molest children. People do. But, if those people know how to communicate with your kids, you'd better be able to do it too." Bob Garfield, Advertising Age, June 7, 2004.
