One million passwords are stolen each week and cybercrime damages are forecasted to reach 10 trillion dollars by 2025, yet your password remains PASSWORD123.
Our work with LastPass was to first understand why consumers refused to take personal password security seriously enough to act, then figure out how to change that behavior. Even with frequent consumer brand data breaches and reports of lives being destroyed by cybercriminals, the brief gusts of fear, concern, and mild panic quickly dissipate into the gentle breeze of that-won’t-happen-to-me.
Like eating healthy, getting enough sleep and daily exercise, fear is the wrong emotion to employ if you want to change long term behavior. To the surprise of no one, we found that people’s brains were so overloaded with the tasks of daily living, there was simply no more room to remember another thing. So, if they forgot their password and got locked out of that digital thing they really needed to do, an emotion surfaced that was more powerful than fear. RAGE. Well, it was more like extreme frustration, but certainly powerful enough to raise cortisol levels. This behavior also explains why people continue to use weak passwords; they are simply just easy to remember. And with a full brain, the immediate pain of not being able to get into their Amazon Prime account is far greater than a Russian hacker holding their digital life for ransom. Yes, consumers are not rational, they are human.
Our agile strategic and creative process led us to create messages that elicited the right emotion to change behavior and drive action. The response to LastPass “relieving the burden of remembering your passwords” was strong, increasing downloads from 50k to 1M a month within the first year of our campaign.
This video was an early experiment as we iterated different strategies and messages. What if we took the fear out of cybercriminals selling your passwords on the dark web and made it more lighthearted and familiar. While this effort recorded the brand’s highest video engagement on social and increased awareness, it did not drive downloads directly. However, by increasing engagement and awareness, consumers were primed to receive new and different messages that elicited emotions like “relieving frustration” which ultimately inspired the direct download action we wanted.
“When ye is agile, ye learns from every action, no effort is wasted.”
- Ben Franklin
Once we established the right message to drive action, we experimented with targeting different audience segments like young knowledge workers with a long form mockumentary video on social platforms and work from home parents with connected TV.
