“Re:scam” by Netsafe & DDB New Zealand

Netsafe is an independent, non-profit online safety organisation. It provides online safety support, expertise and education to people in New Zealand. It’s been around for more than 20 years, founded in 1998 to help New Zealand’s internet users stay safe online.

After noticing the growing influence of technology in their respective areas, the New Zealand Police, Ministry of Education and several not-for-profits teamed up with telecommunication organisations and IT industry partners to create an independent body focussed on online safety. Together they created the Internet Safety Group (rebranded Netsafe in 2008).

In 2018, Netsafe wanted to curb the alarming increase in phishing attacks – fraudulent attempts to obtain personal information through hoax or scam emails. Between 2015 and 2018, phishing attacks had grown by 65% worldwide, and just in New Zealand, $257m per year was being lost to cyber crime – and that’s just the reported amount. The shame and humility victims feel after falling prey to an internet scam means most attacks go unreported.

So Netsafe partnered with DDB New Zealand to create the “Re:scam” initiative, a crew of AI chatbots designed to respond directly to scammers’ tactics. Since launch, the bots have saved thousands from falling victim.

“Re:scam” earned 11 Effies – including seven Gold – in the 2018 Effie Awards New Zealand and 2019 APAC Effie Awards competitions, in categories including IT/Telco, Data Driven, Limited Budget, and Experiential.

Below, Rupert Price, Chief Strategy Officer at DDB New Zealand, explains how it worked.

Effie: What were your objectives for “Re:scam”?

RP: The objectives for the “Re:scam” campaign were relatively straightforward.

First, make people aware of the dangers of internet phishing scams. It was important to educate New Zealanders on the telltale signs of email scams and also to reassure them that they weren’t alone. By demonstrating that this was a widespread problem, we could show New Zealanders there was no shame or humility in being the target of an email scammer – it happens to all of us. This would be measured by earned media coverage, as we had no budget to buy media exposure.

Second, give internet users a tool to fight back against phishing scams. Not only did we want to reduce the number of people falling prey to such scams, we also wanted to discourage the scammers in the first place. By showing the scammers that people were on to them, although outside of legal jurisdiction, we wanted to show them people were prepared to fight back. This would be measured by the level of direct engagement with the campaign.

Third, make people aware of Netsafe’s role in keeping Kiwis safe from harm online. We wanted New Zealanders to know there was an organization protecting their interests online and to show them that they had somewhere to turn if they had any concerns about online safety. Knowing you are not alone is powerful encouragement when fighting back against cyber crime. This would be measured by visits and enquiries to the Netsafe website.

Effie: What was the strategic insight that drove the campaign? 

RP: Obviously email scammers rely on the art of disguise, exploiting people’s inherent sense of trust through pretending to be someone they’re not. To succeed, this scheme relies on most people to be trusting, which most New Zealanders generally are.

Our big insight was, of course, that this ‘bond of trust’ has to work both ways. Not only does the email recipient have to believe they are dealing with a credible sender, but the scammer also has to believe they are dealing with a gullable and willing recipient for the scam to work.

This breakthrough insight gave us our big idea. We were going to beat the email scammers at their own game. If they were going to impersonate people with an ‘offer too good to be true’ then we would impersonate a willing and gullible victim to waste their time – without wasting ours.

Effie: What was your big idea? How did you bring the idea to life?

RP: An AI-powered chatbot that imitated human victims, wasting scammers’ time and protecting real people from harm. Re:scam was an AI-based initiative that gave people a tool to fight back against scammers. When someone received a phishing email, they could forward it to me@rescam.org. Our program then picked up the conversation and replied to the scammer based on the email. Replies were designed to lead scammers on for as long as possible with exchanges that wasted limitless hours of their time.

Effie: If scammers were busy talking to a robot, they weren’t talking to real people.

RP: This was a good first step, but at its heart Re:scam was a faceless entity, not built to be shared en masse. Because we had no media budget, if we wanted to give ourselves a chance of breaking into culture and driving mass awareness, we needed to give the bot some personality. Or rather, multiple personalities.

We introduced AI cat-phishing to the world with a deliberate blend of human and computer-generated creativity.

We engaged IBM’s AI ‘Watson’ to help analyse the content of messages and formulate responses, and created a digital video as the centre-piece of our communications. This mirrored the multiple personalities of Re:scam by showing different C.G. faces and voices flickering in and out.

To show that anyone could be a victim of an email scam, Re:scam was created to mimic various types of personalities. With deliberate spelling mistakes and malapropisms, each “character” had their own backstory and unique way of talking.

From the retiree asking “The Illuminati” if they had a bingo night he could join (and who sent his bank details through One. Number. At. A. Time), to the single mother who was excited to win big money, each was programmed to be as frustrating and time-consuming as possible, while remaining human enough to avoid detection. Sometimes our bots would accuse the scammers themselves of being bots.

Every time they got a response, they now had to second guess themselves.

Effie: How did you measure the effectiveness of the effort? Were there any surprises in the results?

RP: Being a campaign designed to directly encourage consumer interaction (for the campaign to work, it required people to do something), primary measurement was relatively simple. The campaign would succeed or fail based on the number of people who forwarded on their phishing emails and let the Re:scam AI bots to do their thing.

The thing that surprised us most was the sheer volume of responses we received. 210,000 scam emails were forwarded onto us over the campaign period. Most of these were from New Zealand but many were from overseas also. The big learning for us was that an entirely earned and owned channel campaign in today’s media landscape is a truly global campaign, if the idea is strong enough.

The secondary measurement of the campaign, the objective of which was to raise awareness of the issue, showed the earned media coverage for the campaign was everwhere. Through New Zealand news media outlets Re:scam reached an audience of 4m+ across all networks, (that’s nearly the entire population of NZ, by the way). However, the campaign’s global reach was in excess of $300m+ through media outlets as diverse as The BBC, The Guardian, El Pais and CNN.

Effie: What was the greatest challenge you faced when creating this campaign, and how did you approach that challenge?

RP: The greatest challenge we faced with the Re:scam campaign is that we had no media budget. As Netsafe is a non-profit NGO, its primary channel of communication is though the news media. It relies on the ‘newsworthiness’ of the issues to get picked up in the news media and carried to the audience.

Of course, this is a high-risk strategy. There was no guarantee the news media would be intrigued by our initiative, and depending on the news cycle of the day, other stories might take precedent. The news media creates interest, which is then amplified on social media. Since pickup from news channels is vital, we must always push ourselves to come up with ideas that create interest beyond the issue itself. In the case of Re:scam, we knew internet scamming and phishing tactics was a topic of public interest, but we also knew that our unique and innovative AI bot solution would be of equivalent news interest.

Of course, we also had to build the AI Bot, which was no mean feat itself!

Effie: What lessons can marketers take away from your work?

RP:

  • Don’t be afraid to try something that has never been done – someone has to be first, so why not you?
  • If it doesn’t exist, be prepared to build it yourself.
  • Don’t let a lack of a budget hold you back – great ideas will always prevail if there’s enough will and conviction behind them.
  • Make sure your campaign or initiative ‘adds value’ to your audience in some way. If it’s not through utility or enlightenment, at the very least entertain them along the way.

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Rupert Price is the Chief Strategy Officer at DDB New Zealand/Interbrand New Zealand.

Rupert’s career in advertising spans nearly eighteen years in London’s most pre-eminent agencies and now nearly eight years in New Zealand. In the UK, Rupert worked on brand and advertising strategy with Y&R, AMV BBDO, JWT, Saatchi&Saatchi and Ogilvy.

Beginning with local projects for companies including Kellogg’s, Unilever, The Army and Sainsbury’s, Rupert broadened his skill set to take on global strategic roles for BP, SAB Miller, Unilever and American Express amongst others. In 2010, Rupert relocated with his young family to New Zealand.

Now working with DDB and Interbrand, Rupert has delivered strategic projects for Westpac, Lion, The Warehouse, Lotto NZ and now Vodafone. Rupert has won numerous IPA Effectiveness Awards, Effies and APG Awards and has been involved in highly awarded advertising campaigns including Persil ‘Dirt is Good’ and Dove ‘Campaign for Real Beauty.’

Awards earned by “Re:scam”:

2019 APAC Effie Awards:
GOLD – IT/Telco
GOLD – Brand Experience – Services
SILVER – Data Driven

2018 Effie Awards New Zealand:
GOLD – Limited Budget
GOLD – Most Effective Use of Digital Technology
GOLD – Most Effective PR/Experiential Campaign
GOLD – Best Strategic Thinking
GOLD – Most Progressive Campaign
SILVER – New Product or Service
SILVER – Short Term Success
BRONZE – Social Marketing/Public Servic