Prebunking: Film noir meets misinformation

Challenge

The spread of misinformation online poses a huge threat to societies around the world. Jigsaw, a Google unit tackling these threats, wanted to empower people across Europe to spot the signs of online manipulation and better recognise misinformation.

Approach

Landing such an important message across a diverse pan-European audience (27 countries to be exact) needed some serious research.

We noticed a shared interest in crime genre content across all markets. Driven by this insight, we created a series of Film Noir style animations. ​The soundtrack for the campaign was specially commissioned, composed by renowned BAFTA-nominated composer Tandis Jenhudson.​

Our 3 key films aimed to educate viewers about one of society’s biggest online threats in a human and relatable way.

Working in animation allowed us to design culturally-neutral characters and settings, making the pan-European message feel locally relevant.

We created over 260 different versions of the films, in 29 languages, as well as a toolkit of social media assets to support the campaign.

The paid campaign is being run on YouTube in the major markets, as well as organically via a wide range of partners.