It was hard to miss the anti-bullying campaign featuring Monica Lewinsky thanks to a strategic distribution plan by social video platform GlassView.

The campaign, "Click with Compassion,” which launched in October for National Bullying Prevention Month, was created by creative agency BBDO and amplified by Dini von Mueffling Communications, which represents Lewinsky. The film centered around the shocking effect of uttering actual social media comments in real life.

"I'm grateful for the success of this campaign,” said Lewinsky. "Our goal was to help shift the culture of online behavior — notably cyberbullying and online harassment. With this campaign, we aimed to get people to rethink their online behavior — both as someone who may perpetuate bullying behavior or as a bystander.”

The PSA, shot on the streets of Brooklyn, shows a teen girl verbally attacked by another teen. "You're stupid, you know that, right?” The people uttering those lines were actors, but they drew real and empathetic responses from passers-by. The film adroitly illustrates the sickening effect that such bullying elicits.

Dual target presented distribution challenge

The challenge for GlassView was to get the video in front of the right audience of both teens and their parents.

The dual target was designed to change behavior of adults and their children. Sadly, the comments used in the video were drawn mostly from adults posting in social media.

"There's the trickle-down element: a lot of what teens do is based on what they see adults doing,” said Dini von Mueffling, CEO of her eponymous PR agency. "To speak to both of those groups it was essential to show regular people compassionately intervening and modeling ‘upstander' behavior.”

The campaign also had an unusual goal for a PSA: to get viewers to download an app. The app, which let users add #BeStrong emojis to their messaging, is designed to provide comfort to targets of bullying with images of support and solidarity, so they feel less alone.

Daniel Dryburgh, Global Director of Accounts & Operations, said that Lewinsky's involvement ensured some press interest. "Obviously, you have a really big name attached to this,” he said. "From a distribution standpoint, it came down to who we wanted to reach and how we'd use that to drive conversation.”

GlassView was called in to create a media plan for the video in early September. The company hit upon a strategy that targeted teen-focused sites like Teen Vogue and MTV.com as well as parent-focused properties including Parents magazine. Overall, the target was consumers 14–45.

Strategy nets solid results

The campaign hit that target thanks to a solid distribution strategy that netted some stellar results. The click through rate for the campaign was more than three times the industry benchmark. The completion rate for the video was 56% over the industry benchmark. The campaign also drove 584 downloads of the app in October. Press impressions were in the hundreds of millions.

But the best metric was the number of conversations the campaign elicited in social media and in real life. "It was meant to drive conversation,” said Dryburgh. "It makes you think and that's the benefit of targeting both the kids who are the victims of this and the parents who need to be reminded about it.”