The government strategy that reduced online piracy among 16 to 24-year-olds

Online piracy of music, films, sport and games has been rising consistently and, with the pandemic and everyone stuck at home, it was set to skyrocket.

Why? Because this audience loves a bit of free content; a cheeky film here, the latest PS5 game there or a sneaky football match streamed from a platform they don’t subscribe to.

But what people don’t know is the intellectual property industries are central to the stability of the UK economy. The UK’s creative industry supports around 2.8 million UK jobs each year and contributes about £10 million per hour to the UK economy. If online piracy continues at this rate, it will mean millions lost in an economic black hole and a significant decline in jobs.

Get it Right From A Genuine Site is a government-supported campaign to reduce online piracy by 16-24 year old males. The campaign is backed by an association between the BPI, the UK record labels association, and the MPA representing the global film, TV and streaming industry.

Tin Man had one objective and one objective only: help reduce piracy from illegal sites in 2020.

The strategy

Data told us our bullseye audience was 16-24 year old, urban males. Early 2020 and weeks of insight planning told us to make a difference we’d need to go bold and poke fun at illegal downloaders.

In doing so, we’d make them think twice about the impact of illegal downloads and nudge them along the path to behaviour change. And going 100% digital for this group was a no brainer.

But March (and a little thing called Coronavirus) hit. All plans came to a screeching halt.

Our audience was rudderless. They were now stuck at home. Of those who were in education, many were clobbered in the exam grade fiasco and many were now learning remotely (or not at all). Those who were in employment were furloughed or unemployed almost overnight and this was taking its toll emotionally.

Poking fun at this group was no longer going to wash. And being at home, the temptation to download content illegally would be at an all-time high. This was going to have a massive negative impact on our client’s single objective.

We had to get out there and fast, but we needed to drastically adjust our plan, our messaging and our direction if we were going to change behaviour in our new Covid-world. Through a rigorous qual and quant research process in collaboration with Ipsos MORI we developed our new strategy.

Using our audience’s favourite influencers, we would emotionally engage using humour but with a more positive and uplifting tone. We used three strategic pillars to create behaviour change:

• Celebrate the creative content that got us through lockdown.
• Show support to those in the creative industries who create the content we love.
• Empower our audience to do the right thing and ‘Get It Right From A Genuine Site’.

The campaign

Who better to deliver the message than creators from the entertainment, comedy and music industry that not only rely on legal downloads of their content for survival, but that this audience love - almost more than their mates.

Our talent needed to resonate with our young, male audience and, secondly, they needed to be successful enough that our audience would enjoy their content but not so successful that we would incite a ‘help a rich entertainer get richer’ backlash. Through a meticulous selection and testing process, we identified the best talent to engage our audiences: online viral character-based comedian Munya Chawawa; rap duo Krept & Konan; and social media comedian Amelia Gething.

Creative treatments and scripts were developed in conjunction with the talent so they felt authentic and brought to life their characters for which they were known and loved. The content was designed to celebrate the invaluable output of the creative industries – the TV shows, the films, the music and the games - that have been a lifeline to millions throughout the tough times of lockdown.

Hero films (60 secs) and various edits - 30 sec, 15 sec and 6 sec spots - were shared all over Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and our talents’ socials through a paid, earned, shared and owned programme. In addition, we masterminded a complete website relaunch while organic social channels were refreshed and the monthly content calendar was filled with engaging and relevant news.

This project was a winner at The Drum Awards for PR 2021. To find out which Drum Awards are currently open for entry, click here.