DDB NZ’s ‘Worst Children’s Library’ Was A More Complex Data Project Than McDonald’s Monopoly

Content warning: This story contains references to self-harm and suicide. If you are struggling, please seek help. Support is available through Lifeline on 13 11 14 in Australia, or in New Zealand, you can call 0800 LIFELINE or the Suicide Crisis Helpline on 0508 TAUTOKO

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​DDB Group Aotearoa’s ‘The Worst Children’s Library’ for Samsung was such a complicated data project it made McDonald’s annual Monopoly promotion seem comparatively straightforward.

​Haydn Kerr, Track + Tribal Aotearoa’s executive creative director, told LBB that while the Macca’s competition is “gigantic in volume”, it’s “low in complexity, as the data is perfectly structured. It’s a single database, each data point is captured and rendered consistently.”

In contrast, creating ‘The Worst Children’s Library’ required dealing with “a tsunami of oddly-shaped data” that the agency filtered, validated, and codified to create a real-life library of the horrors children see online, from self-harm to killing animals.

“Our task was [to] basically make sense of the messy, hidden parts of the internet,” Haydn says. “There was no existing logic or taxonomy. Just an endless number of sources, each one with its own language.

“To be honest, when we pitched the idea, we thought the task was going to be much easier than it was. It’s one of the most important issues facing society, so we assumed that someone would have already created a database and catalogued the online harm that’s been recorded.”

In reality, the team had to build a world-first database from scratch, creating a ‘Dewey Decimal System of Harm’ that classified and catalogued data collected from police reports, court documents, coroners’ reports, research papers, news reports, and government and NGO material. The journey took the team to obscure places, from the Journal of Psychosocial Research in Cyberspace to the New Zealand Secret Service, His Majesty’s Coroner’s Office in the UK to the University of Ljubjana in Slovenia.

“Police and courts were one of our major sources,” Haydn explained. “Parents around the world have taken platforms to court and provided huge detail about what their kids have seen.

“For example, there’s a case where parents are taking the creators of Character.ai to court for the role their AI chatbots played in the suicide of their son, who appears to have fallen in love with an AI bot who spent a disturbing amount of time talking about death and suicide.”

Coroners’ reports were also useful, because “they detailed the role that online harm has played in the deaths of children and teenagers.”

The range of sources relied upon showed DDB Group just how multifaceted the issue is, stretching across fields like law, health, public safety, psychology, media, and technology. Despite his job and tech-savviness, Haydn was shocked at “the sheer volume and the level of depravity.”

“I’d never imagine that a child has seen an actual rape or lynching or suicide or a bull being skinned alive,” he said.

“It is pervasive, omnipresent -- but completely unseen by me and most people. Until you go looking. Then it’s everywhere.

“I was confronted by how shallow and biased my own understanding of the internet is, based on my boring interests. And that’s the challenge for all parents: we think we know the internet, but we only know our internet. Our children are experiencing a very different internet.”

The team landed on the ‘Dewey Decimal System of Harm’ quite early: risky and unsafe behaviour; addictive content; anti-social behaviour; self-harm; grooming and predators; scams, misinformation, and disinformation; sexually explicit material; violence; and extremism.

When it came time to choose the 1,160 book titles, “art took over from the data science.”

“We reflected on the data to develop the story we wanted to tell, and then made artistic decisions about which stories struck a chord with us.

“So the end result is broadly representative, while at the same time-- it’s not completely hamstrung by the data. We used a very human, creative layer of interpretation.”

Most people who worked on the project have children, and Haydn noted “the risk of trauma is quite real.” They stuck to the research, versus viewing harmful content themselves, and experienced feelings of nausea and heartburn. “I can feel it now,” Haydn said, just talking about the material he waded through. “I genuinely do not understand what it is, but everyone felt it. We would often have to cut meetings short because the feeling just got too strong.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure anyone would want to repeat it,” he said. “We’d need to get a different data team.”

The library at Auckland Intermediate School was open across a weekend in April, with every session booked out and attended by teachers, parents, and government ministers.

The integrated campaign was in partnership with Samsung and Safe Surfer, a platform that uses smart technology and filtering to protect kids from harmful content. Last year, it joined forces with Samsung to debut the Kid-Safe Smartphone, which has in-built safety features and filtering.