L'Enfant Bleu - The Fortnite Undercover Avatar

Agency: L'Enfant Bleu

During the first wave of covid-19, French authorities noticed a decrease reports of domestic violence directed to children, that only meant that other adults were no longer able to detect it. Therefore, our objective was to help children report abuse during the pandemic.

We collaborated with L'Enfant Bleu, a French association that is involved in safeguarding the welfare of French children to find a solution.

We chose Fortnite, a game with more than 380M players, where 53% are aged between 10 and 25 years old, and we inserted an undercover avatar that allowed young players to confide without arousing suspicion of those abusing them.

Our game developers created out the character that would be the confident of young children on Fortnite. The character remained online 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

Our strategy had 2 phases: The first that was more secretive so parents and guardians would not notice anything... and the last phase, a massive PR initiative, where we let the world know about the initiative once the avatar was deactivated.

While our Fortnite character was online, we received 1200 friend requests from kids, 30% related to dangerous situations.

The day we released the project, we got +50M PR impressions.

Undercover Avatar generated more than 700M media impression thanks to all press coverage.

Impact was so strong that French government decided to set up a specific task force in order to work on solutions to turn video games into a new way to identify abused kid.