AVAST
GEORGE ORWELL
BRIEF
The spying game has come a long, long way since the Cold War. But, nevertheless as a society and as individuals, we have never been more intensely surveilled. From online ads that follow us around the internet, to government-backed acts of billion-dollar IP theft, the internet has created the perfect conditions for boundless violations of personal, corporate, and national privacy.
Global cyber-security business, Avast, came to us with this exact challenge. How do we wake up businesses and private individuals and make them care about how every single day our digital civil liberties are being eroded. Our right to privacy. Our right to anonymity. And our right to free speech.
IDEA
Big Brother. George Orwell. 1984. A text that forms part of our collective national consciousness, from the 16-year-old school kid (it’s still on the syllabus) through to older business owners that remember the John Hurt film.
We’re living in exactly the hyper-surveilled society that Orwell predicted. What better universally understood cultural device for Avast to tell its story?
The thing is, Orwell called it so correctly that we really didn’t need to change much. Certainly no need for a rewrite. All of the surveillance challenges we are experiencing today are precisely those predicted over 70 years ago.
So when it came to the idea, we could keep things beautifully, elegantly, simple.
We would simply replace four numerals. 1984 becomes 2021, on the cover and throughout the text.
The multi-layered campaign included a physical print of the book, a Kindle edition, and an audiobook available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, with actor Matt Smith playing the role of Winston Smith.
The simplest ideas really are the best.
RESULTS
The campaign crossed borders and landed big hits in B2B and tech titles, while simultaneously landing consumer splash after consumer splash. Over 80% of coverage included a quote from our Avast spokesperson and literally every single piece included our key message, along the lines of “Avast shows that Orwell’s dystopian predictions have come true in 2021”.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future.” Here was an idea that did exactly that. By taking control of the shared ingrained cultural knowledge of a single text from the past, we were able to powerfully impact the discourse of the future.
