Results and Effectiveness

The ability to personalise and customise blockpages helped fathers teach their sons about sex without them having to actually talk about it. Therefore, Asian fathers who found it extremely hard to broach the topic of sex with their sons found the service valuable. Especially since, the sons have no idea that their dads customised the pages. Subscription increased by 29% (Source: StarHub Marketing) Traffic to the SafeSurf website increased by 27% (Source: StarHub Marketing)

Creative Execution

We turned SafeSurf from a service that merely censors adult content into a service that offers fathers an opportunity to teach their sons about sex, without them having to talk about it. Since in Asia, most fathers find it awkward to talk about the birds and the bees. We helped fathers customise their own blockpages with videos designed to entertain and educate children. All customised pages are tied to unique IP addresses. So when a boy attempts to visit a porn site, he will see a personalised page. But what he WILL NOT know is his dad personalised it. All the videos were fun and unserious, making the talks easy, informal and causal. The project turned an ignored space (block pages for porn) into a relevant media space (personalised pages for fathers to teach their sons about the birds and the bees).

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

StarHub SafeSurf wanted to engage parents and increase subscription of its adult content control service. The challenge: SafeSurf is not very different from the multitude of Internet content control services in the marketplace. The insight: Research shows that the phase when boys start to experiment with porn coincides with the phase when they start to learn about sex. So why not take the opportunity to educate boys about sex when they attempt to log on to their first porn site?