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Digital Marketing Agency T19 invited LEAP to collaborate with them on a pan-European campaign combatting online piracy for Internet Matters. The project faced three challenges: maximising audience appeal, tight turnaround times for production, and audio localisation.

The campaign needed to appeal to a diverse international audience to warn families about the risks of streaming illegal downloads, a problem that had been on the increase during recent lockdowns. LEAP’s animation team developed cute, expressive bean-shaped characters and cell-style animation so that viewers of any age, gender or nationality could relate to and absorb the campaign messaging.

Animation projects can often take months to complete, but LEAP’s production teams found a way to massively condense the production process by using time zones to their advantage. LEAP’s producers could take briefing information and feedback from UK-based clients at the end of the working day which corresponded with the start of the workday for their LA-based animator. The animator would then have time to complete the next stage of work and submit it for review by the UK team in the morning, GMT.

The final challenge was to ensure that the voice-overs would maintain the same friendly, informative tone and delivery style across local markets as well as fit within the fixed duration of the master animation. It turned out that the transcreated Italian script was longer than the German and English versions. The voiceover artist would need to speak quickly and clearly but avoid sounding too intense.

LEAP worked with voiceover agency partners to organise remote connections for the recording sessions taking place in local markets. This enabled the London-based creative director to provide guidance that would ensure cross-market brand consistency while in-market directors could support the voiceover artists in their native countries.

The digital and social media campaign won more than 22 million impressions and had a total reach of nearly eight million families in the UK, Germany and Italy. Campaign viewers reacted positively with a 39% increase in legal streaming searches and a 44% reduction in searches for illegal streams.