XTL
Award Category
Finance/Insurance/Government/Corporate & Real Estate Winner
Agency
UM
Client
Department of Social Services, Australian Government
Objectives
One in three Australian women experience physical violence in their adult lifetime and almost one in five experience sexual violence. UM was tasked with changing attitudes to violence, to encourage teens to be respectful in their early relationships, to learn new ways to interact with one another and help prevent violence later in life. The agency had to reach a campaign understanding figure of 60%, achieve 10 million organic impressions and demonstrate public support of key teen role models.
Campaign
UM found that because most teen communications live online, if online abuse was left unchecked it could manifest in violent behaviours later on, but also that young people were resistant to intervention by authorities. The insight was that teens are willing to speak out against disrespectful behaviour but need to feel they are a part of a bigger community taking a stand. The campaign involved creating an online term – ‘#XTL’ – that teenagers could use to call out behaviour they considered to be ‘crossing the line’. UM created XTL definitions in Wikipedia, Slang and Urban Dictionary and optimised their SEO performance to feature in top search results to establish the term’s meaning. It recruited celebrity role models such as Ed Sheeran, Reece Mastin and Missy Higgins to use the term and share their personal experience of XTL behaviours. It also created designer #XTL t-shirts and distributed them to influential media outlets, encouraging personalities to support the initiative. Working with social influencers such as Teen Survival Guide and Shardette, UM opened the debate about what crossing the line meant to the audience. Live Twitter Q&As were held during radio show Hot Hits and existing campaign communities were promoted to generate conversations in social media.
Results
About 80% of teens aware of the campaign correctly identified the meaning of XTL when surveyed and 86% used it in its correct context. More than 16,000 online conversations using XTL were registered, generating 108,00 social interactions. A total of 21 million organic social impressions were recorded and the campaign nearly doubled the original media investment.
Judges Comments
XTL didn’t feel like a marketing campaign at all. It was authentic and felt like a genuine social movement with a heartbeat of its own. Talking to a demographic who have an ‘outright rejection’ towards traditional advertising, XTL was able to smash down these barriers and deliver a message with impact and truly impressive results.
