CAMELEON and Libre MullenLowe Paris are Hitting Hard with Cyber-Crime Shock Campaign

The film: an illuminating “mise-en-abyme”

The film features a hidden-camera social experiment: a mother distributes photos of her daughter to passers-by, revealing intimate details such as the places she frequents and her hobbies. In just one minute, this fictional scenario highlights the risks of sharing personal information on social networks, particularly when children are involved.

Antoine Colin, chief creative officer, “Since I started working with CAMELEON, I've stopped sharing photos of my children on social networks. The risk is much higher than you might think. When you look at the figures, it's chilling. Would it ever occur to us to hand them out to strangers in the street? To give potential sexual predators all the information they need to track them down? No. Nobody does that. So why do it on the internet? The parallel transposed into real life seems to me to be a simple and effective way of raising awareness of a real social problem.”

A campaign to raise awareness of “sharenting”

Distributed digitally, the film ‘Merci’ aims to raise awareness of this practice. Every day, parents, families and friends share personal details about their children, often without realising it. This information opens the door to sexual predators.

According to Violaine Monmarché, deputy managing director of CAMELEON, “We put a lot of thought and thought into every word, because we didn't want to stigmatise parents, but to emphasise “why we need to be vigilant in this role”: in the file of each image posted, without realising it, we are also sharing hidden data, such as the time of day or the geolocation of the photo, and the danger is even greater when we include other details in the post.”

An unequivocal print component

The print campaign illustrates this reality with striking visuals created using artificial intelligence: three versions showing men, telephone in hand, in places frequented by children (school playground, bus stop, playground, etc.). For the first time, sexual predators are featured, reinforcing the impact of the message. The visual is accompanied by the sentence: ‘Thank you for exposing your children on social networks. Now I know where to find them. Millions of sexual predators do what I do’.

The campaign highlights this chilling reality: the boundary between the digital world and the real world is not impermeable.

Too often we think that online sexual predators stop at the images. The reality is very different: 40% of people who have consulted paedocriminal content online have subsequently tried to contact a child. And just like the faces of print predators, they look like ordinary people, and are present in all walks of life.

For Antoine Colin, creative director, “Thanks to artificial intelligence above all. It's not easy to find actors willing to pose as predators and expose themselves as such all over France. So Marc Da Cunha Lopes and I decided to do everything using AI. From A to Z. Many thanks to him for this titanic task and the stunning results. With his talent, he's joining the ranks of those who are fighting against cybercrime.”

According to Violaine Monmarché, deputy managing director of CAMELEON, “The campaign is extremely dense, but absolutely clear: LIBRE MullenLowe rose the challenge of putting across all the key messages in ultra-impactful, understated formats. It's very rare to have this level of instinctive understanding and buy-in with an agency: they've intrinsically adopted our cause, and together we're already teeming with ideas for what's next. Our greatest satisfaction would be that, before posting their child on the internet, every adult asked themselves the same question as us: “Do I really want to share it?”