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IPAF: Targeting 'accidental pirates'

After the success of the What Are You Really Burning campaign, the Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation decided to move away from the finger-pointing approach that anti-piracy materials usually take.
“Content theft is not a message that people are queuing up to hear,” admits IPAF CEO Gail Grant.
Based on information from their latest research, which monitors attitudes towards film and television content and piracy, IPAF broke down the Australian public into four attitudinal segments and took this information to a number of advertising agencies. The Furnace came back with an integrated approach and recommended to have not just one message, but many, to address the four segments.
“Pointing fingers at people is hardly an effective way of getting them to change attitudes or behaviour. Therefore we needed to change the overall approach, moving from telling people off to having a conversation with them on their level,” said Tony Singleton, managing director at The Furnace.
For the first stage of the campaign, The Furnace concentrated on the ‘blind actives’: people who think piracy is wrong, yet they are unaware that they are in fact committing acts of piracy. This segment amounts to 34 percent of the population; the agency coined the term “Accidental Pirate” for them.
“With this idea as a strategic framework, we created a communication that delivered the serious message almost surreptitiously. We used a bit of humour by creating likeable caricatures of everyday Australians to disarm the automatic barriers to the message, before hitting them with the actual message which challenged them to become more informed in the future,” said Singleton.
The spot features actor Dan Wyllie as a number of characters – male and female. It was shot on the Red One camera; production, from start to finish, took approximately four weeks.
The budget for this spot was limited, yet Flying Fish director Adam Blaiklock and executive producer Paul Freidmann had to create eight different characters – each with its own costume and make-up requirements – in two days, with eight location moves. This type of mobility was also a challenge for the lighting, camera and grip departments.
They searched for locations that were in close proximity to each other, that would have a crowd in the background, – a crowded market or kid’s soccer match – so that the scenes felt like a vox pop/candid response.
In the end, they chose the Sydney suburbs of Lidcombe, Haberfield and Rozelle.
“It was all about negotiation with locations and crew all of whom gave us their time a facilities at greatly reduced rates, or for free,” said Freidmann. “For example, The Wilkie group was simply amazing and donated a team of road workers, excavators, trucks, and access to his site. In normal commercial circumstances that alone would have cost thousands. Gal Roussos, our tireless production manager, did an extraordinary job in piecing this together.”
According to Blaiklock, the spot is a performance-driven piece that must establish eight characters in 16 seconds. It had to feel natural.
“We wanted the commercial to have a naturalistic feel to it. We decided to keep the camera tracking in on each of the characters to enhance the realisation that they are doing something dishonest. Since the commercial is performance-driven, the technical side of this didn’t and shouldn’t get in the way,” he explained.
“It was a very enjoyable process work shopping the characters with Wylie, creating their back stories and personalities. As time was limited – we had about an hour to shoot each scene – we set the character in each location and I would then interview the character, asking him/her questions about life, family and films. This worked its way into their film/TV collections and each characters association with downloading, burning and buying pirated films. The sad part is the commercial has to be 30 seconds.”
The happy part is that this campaign will continue, with a further three stages planned. The first would target a wider group; the second thank those who support the industry by doing the right thing and the third, address hardcore pirates by rattling their current belief that they are immune from being watched.

TITLE: Honestly Unawares
CLIENT: Intellectual Property Awareness
Foundation (IPAF)
AGENCY: The Furnace Sydney
CREATIVE DIRECTOR : Paul Fenton
PRO DUCTION CO MPANY: Flying Fish
DIRECTOR : Adam Blaiklock
PRO DUCER: Paul S Friedmann
DOP: Damien Wyvill

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