Animated Campaign to Combat Online Piracy

The use of online pirated content grew in the UK, Germany and Italy during lockdowns, so Internet Matters and their digital agency T19 needed a pan-European digital and social media campaign to warn families about the risks. They identified the Easter school holidays as a key time for accessing high volumes of online content and set this as the launch date.

They needed LEAP to produce videos for three creative concepts, each with three language variations, and all needed to be completed within a tight turnaround time. The objective would be to maximise audience appeal through the creation of relatable characters, an informative yet friendly animation style and localised audio.

Animation projects can take months, so we enlisted our LA-based animator to make the time zones work to our advantage. With London evenings overlapping LA mornings, briefs and feedback could be actioned overnight (from a UK perspective), thereby condensing the production schedule.

Our team developed cute, expressive bean-shaped characters and cell-style animation so that viewers of any age, gender or nationality could relate to and absorb the campaign messaging.

LEAP and our voiceover agency partners set up remote connections for in-market recording sessions. Our London-based creative director ensured cross-market brand consistency while local market directors supported the voiceover artists in their native countries. This was particularly important for the transcreated Italian scripts which were longer than the others. To fit within the animation timings, the voiceover artist would need to speak quickly, clearly and avoid sounding too intense.

The campaign was a great success – achieving more than 22 million impressions and a total reach of nearly eight million families in the UK, Germany and Italy. Campaign viewers reacted well with a 39% increase in legal streaming searches and a 44% reduction in searches for illegal streams.