Undercover Avatar - Association L'Enfant Bleu
Association L'Enfant Bleu

Gold

Title of Entry:	Undercover Avatar
Brand:	Association L'Enfant Bleu
Product/Service:	Association L'Enfant Bleu
Client:	Association L'Enfant Bleu
Entrant Company:	Havas Play
Submission Text:	Between March and April 2020, violences against children increased by 50%. Locked down with their abusers, children were almost trapped during this crisis. Association L’Enfant Bleu wanted to free their words in a secure and undercover way. Video games, free speech space by nature, and especially Fortnite, appeared as the perfect safe zone. WE HAD SEVERAL OBJECTIVES LINKED TO THE ASSOCIATION MISSION: 1/ Help children to speak. The priority of the association. We didn't expect a specific result, it’s impossible to draw KPI on children suffering. In one month, we helped 1200 children. 2/ Save children. 30% of these confide in us abuses. Several files were shared with authorities. 3/ Alert public authorities about the critical situation. Because we wanted to maintain this mechanism to help children in the long-term. 4/ Awareness In one week, we reached more than 700M cumulative audience in 35 countries. 5/ Increase donations Video games appeared as a perfect fitting space to contact children. Moreover, we observe a transformation in usage of video games which become more and more social place, it’s“metaverse”. We took this opportunity by investing in this new social area not used by parents. We chose a focus on Fortnite, a true societal phenomenon gathering 380M of players around the world. A considerable part of our audience plays at Fortnite, and this game becomes a true social media where we can play, watch movies, chat, and attend a concert. We’ve created a character with a distinctive name and blocked all names close to us to impeach other players to use our identity. We also bought a skin with a specific appearance completed with other items from the online shop to make him even more unique and recognizable by children. The whole character creation was thought through native game features without the necessity of development. This character was played by an agency and association team 24/7. Everyone behind the character had to follow a specific process defined by psychologists and each criminal record was checked and validated by police services. To make known this character in order to be added by children in need, we worked with influencers and e-sport team as MCES or PRISM specifically speaking to children only without raising parents' suspicions. Then, we expand our scope by working with influencers outside gaming bu with the audience we wanted to reach. We worked with them on adapted content for Twitch, Snapchat or Instagram stories, reaching short-time and viral contents in order to not let our footprint anywhere to avoid that abusive people can see our initiative. During the first lockdown, we decided to reveal our character. We’ve modified our communication to go to a more classic PR phase. We established an exclusivity with the AFP, allowing us access to a release widely displayed. We reached our previous influencers to make them testify on mainstream media and explain the initiative with their own words. Communicating with the state secretary in charge of child protection, we aligned our communication with the announcement of the first work force with editors, police, justice and government. By proving the efficiency of our bias, we positioned ourselves as alert launchers, so everyone could sit around the same table to imagine innovative solutions based on video games, in order to help all the children, all over the world, for years to come. Following the Undercover Avatar operation, the French government launched a taskforce with game developers, the police, and the Enfant Bleu Association. The task force made 10 legislative proposals for preventing child abuse through video games, they are currently under legislative review. The proposals are various such as implementing a compulsory warning screen in video games to inform underage players, or committing video game publishers to create a child-protection label. Some proposition has already been adopted, and police officers are now going undercover in video games. Moreover Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union awarded the innovative aspect of the project. Other European police has been very interested in this project and wanted to know how to proceed. It opened us the doors of the EU commission, where we have been invited to present the project. TO SUM IT UP : •In one month, we helped 1200 children, meaning 30 per day. • Since the end of the operation, the association observe an increase of 73% calls to signal abuses. • More than these 1200 children contacted in Fortnite, 2041 files have been opened in 2020 against 1176 in 2019. • The Association had to hire new employees to face this rise in demand. • On these 1200 children, 30% of them confide to us physical or moral abuse cases. • On these 30%, several files have been shared immediately with authorities. In 2020, the association received €200K of donations from general public, on a total of €600K. Today, 2021 numbers are not yet calculated but the first estimation form the association team is about an increase of 10 to 20% of general public donation. Finally, we spent 0€ to set up this operation. We partnered with KOL for free and we only communicated on their channels without media buying. Regarding the production, we only used Fortnite’s native tools.