All projects · El Mundo
Bullying or Not
If you can't tell them apart, that's the message.
- Client
- El Mundo
- Year
- 2016
- Industry
- Media / Social action
- Role
- Development
- Creative agency
- VCCP Spain
- Launch
- May 2016
Home
An online experiment to find out whether you can spot bullying: listen and guess, you have four chances.
Summary
El Mundo wanted to raise awareness of school bullying and get society to report situations that often go unnoticed. VCCP Spain, in its first work for the newspaper, came up with a web experience built on laughter: users listen and decide whether it is an innocent moment or a case of bullying. Our team turned that concept into a working site.
Screens
Data shown is anonymized.
Listen and decide
Audio only. The waveform moves with the sound and you have to decide without seeing anything.
The answer on video
After answering, the video appears with faces pixelated. What sounded like a joke may not be one, and vice versa.
Transition to video
The video enters in three strips that come into focus one by one, as if the image appeared behind the sound.
Result
The ending turns the miss into the message: if it is hard to tell from outside, pay attention to the slightest sign.
The problem
School bullying often goes unnoticed. The creative challenge was to make users feel first hand how hard it is to spot.
- The campaign had to mobilise society to report it and push for real protocols.
- The experience relied on sound, across 2016 desktop and mobile browsers.
- The site would be promoted by a national newspaper and had to stay stable.
Approach
VCCP's concept rested on laughter, something shared by innocent fun and bullying. We turned it into a direct web experience: listen, decide and see the result, with nothing distracting from the audio. Getting it wrong was the message, so the execution had to make every decision feel immediate and honest.
What we built
Listen first
Each round starts with a laugh and its waveform. Nothing else on screen but the sound.
Bullying or Not
One binary decision per round, four chances and a progress indicator on top.
The reveal
After each answer, the video shows what was really happening behind that laugh.
The result and the call
The number of misses and the final message: bullying hides behind laughter, pay attention and report it. Signed by El Mundo, with sharing.
Reliable audio, responsive
Sound playback on desktop and mobile within the autoplay restrictions of the time, with a light load for the traffic peaks of the launch.
Stack
- HTML5
Results
An experience that only works if the sound arrives on time and the decision is immediate. That was the job.
- The message depended on users getting it wrong, so the experience had to be frictionless.
- A light, stable site for a national newspaper's launch.
Visual system
A blurred background, a dark frame and a widely spaced geometric sans in capitals.
- Text#E2E0DC
- Frame#242421
- Background#5B5C55
- Skin#8A7D70
- El Mundo blue#3C6AA6
- OR
Nunito Sans
Widely spaced capitals and outline buttons