| Title | THE UNSEEN STATS |
| Brand | BT SPORT |
| Product/Service | BT |
| Category |
D06. Sports for Good |
|
Entrant
|
WUNDERMAN THOMPSON London, UNITED KINGDOM
|
|
Idea Creation
|
WUNDERMAN THOMPSON London, UNITED KINGDOM
|
|
Production
|
WUNDERMAN THOMPSON London, UNITED KINGDOM
|
Credits
| Steve Aldrige |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Chief Creative Officer |
| Christopher McKee |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Creative Director |
| Richard Morgan |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Creative Director |
| Matt Steward |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Chief Client Officer |
| Andy Lane |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Chief Client Officer |
| Phil Watson |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Business Director |
| Natalie Wilson |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Senior Account Manager |
| Rebecca Pinn |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Strategist |
| Sam Huckle |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Creative |
| Josh Baggot |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Creative |
| Tyler Hendy |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Designer |
| Nick Firth |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Designer |
| Paul Grainger |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Head of Studio |
| Mariana Lima |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
CRM Partner |
| Jane Evans |
Wunderman Thompson UK |
Senior Data Strategy Director |
Why is this work relevant for Entertainment?
In 2021, society, and sport, had reached a tipping point in the battle against inequality.
BT’s brand mission is to Connect for Good. So, they wanted to use their platform – as a sports broadcaster and connectivity provider – to lead the fight against online abuse.
Comments that get you arrested in real life, live free online. We couldn’t stand on the sidelines any longer, we aimed to expose this unknown side of the internet and shine a light on the problem to then use as a foundation to impact real societal change.
Background
Comments that get you arrested in real life, live free online.
The online world has become a free-for-all of explicit, aggressive, and offensive content aimed at every-day people and celebrities. Nobody is safe.
With abuse and abusers sitting on a wide spectrum of severity. From small unsuspecting public comments to those actively sending death threats.
The epidemic only grew in 2021, both in society and in sport, as the nation went into three national lockdowns and the internet became an outlet for unrest. While players performed on the pitch, their social feeds, and those of the fans and general public, were being filled with hate.
BT’s purpose is to Connect for Good meaning, “it’s not good enough to stand by while online abuse goes unchallenged”.
Describe the creative idea
We built a revolutionary Artificial intelligence Engine, to track hate in real time.
Using manually crafted natural language detection we catalogued offensive tweets from ‘offensive’ to ‘death threat’. Probabilistic and heuristic models inferred whether the tweet poster was a troll. While other forms of Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis extracted emojis, handles, hashtags, swear words, and sentiment.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
The results from our AI tracker were fused with the outputs from a national Online Abuse Survey. Created in partnership with YouGov it explored the hidden depths of online abuse.
In total, over 200,000 different data points were analysed, evaluated, and distilled.
What we discovered was a nationwide hate epidemic. 1.8 million suffered threatening behavior and 1 in 10 received abuse online last year.
Describe the strategy
BT’s purpose is to Connect for Good meaning, “it’s not good enough to stand by while online abuse goes unchallenged”.
So, if data was knowledge. And knowledge was power. We’d use data to wake up a nation to the online abuse epidemic. Shining a light on the facts that no one was discussing. But those that mattered most.
The Unseen Stats.
No ordinary campaign. This was a movement for change.
So, inspired by the theory of political activism, we based our strategy around the Agitate, Educate and Affiliate model – used by everyone from the Black Panthers to Barack Obama.
Working with online abuse charity, Glitch, and its founder Seyi Akiwowo, BT could establish a credible and authentic voice.
Describe the execution
We built a revolutionary Artificial intelligence Engine, to track hate in real time.
Using manually crafted natural language detection we catalogued offensive tweets from ‘offensive’ to ‘death threat’. Probabilistic and heuristic models inferred whether the tweet poster was a troll. While other forms of Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis extracted emojis, handles, hashtags, swear words, and sentiment.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
The results from our AI tracker were fused with the outputs from a national Online Abuse Survey. Created in partnership with YouGov it explored the hidden depths of online abuse.
In total, over 200,000 different data points were analysed, evaluated, and distilled.
What we discovered was a nationwide hate epidemic. 1.8 million suffered threatening behavior and 1 in 10 received abuse online last year.
Describe the outcome
The Unseen Stats fueled the national conversation around online hate – bringing the sheer scale of the problem to light for the first time ever.
The overall impact of The Unseen Stats campaign to date:
500 pieces of online abuse has been actively reported or removed on BT social channels
25% reduction in online abuse tracked on Twitter via our Abuse Tracker, over ‘The Unseen Stats’ launch weekend*
£800,000 earned media generated
485 pieces of press coverage
5m print circulation reached
0.5m Tweets tracked and categorised
During each game in the Euros, we tracked and reported, on average, one abusive tweet every 3 seconds across all Home Nations Group matches
Our work was subsequently used to inform and define BT’s new anti-online abuse policy - with their social media teams proactively tracking, deleting, blocking and reporting abuse on their channels.
We’re also continuing to work