Children of the Street Society's 'I Shared a Photo' digital campaign, created by Cossette Vancouver in March 2013, reframed online image-sharing as a child
ARCHIVEHow Cossette Made Canada Rethink Sharing a Child's Photo Online
"I Shared a Photo" is a 2013 digital public service campaign by Children of the Street Society, created by Cossette Vancouver, that confronts the hidden dangers of sharing images of children online by placing ordinary photo-sharing behaviour within the context of sexual exploitation prevention.
Children of the Street Society is a British Columbia charity dedicated to preventing child and youth sexual exploitation and trafficking, as documented in campaign archive records. The organisation commissioned Cossette's Vancouver office to produce a campaign capable of reaching Canadian audiences during a concentrated active period running from March 11 to 17, 2013. The campaign's central premise is disarmingly direct: an act as familiar and emotionally uncomplicated as posting a child's photograph online carries consequences that most parents and caregivers do not pause to consider. By drawing that line between the routine and the dangerous, the campaign positioned childhood safety not as an abstract policy concern but as a decision made every day by ordinary people across Canada.
As a digital campaign, "I Shared a Photo" operates within the public interest category and comprises a single media asset, as recorded in Clapboard's archive. Its scope was deliberately Canadian, with no evidence of a global rollout, keeping its messaging anchored to the social and legislative context of the Canadian market. The campaign belongs to a sustained body of work that Cossette produced for Children of the Street Society throughout the mid-2010s, a lineage that also includes the 2015 film campaign "Hooked" and the 2016 digital campaign "New Follower," both documented in archive records. Within that body of work, "I Shared a Photo" stands as the founding statement — the moment the partnership identified online image-sharing as a specific and urgent vector of risk for Canadian children and built a public communication strategy around that insight. Clapboard scores this campaign 71/100.
ARCHIVEChildren of the Street Society identified a specific behavioural gap: Canadians who would never knowingly endanger a child were routinely sharing photographs of children in ways that could facilitate exploitation. That insight shaped every strategic decision in the campaign. Rather than addressing the population most resistant to child safety messaging — those who actively cause harm — the campaign directed its energy toward the much larger population of well-intentioned adults whose digital habits create unintended vulnerability.
The strategic context in Canada was significant. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which operates the national tip line Cybertip Ca, has consistently documented the volume of child sexual abuse material reported through its systems, establishing a clear evidentiary basis for public education campaigns of this kind. Publications from the federal government, including those available through Publications Gc Ca, have further reinforced that online exploitation of children represents an ongoing and evolving public safety challenge in Canada. Against that backdrop, a campaign targeting the upstream behaviour of image-sharing rather than the downstream consequences of exploitation represented a genuinely differentiated strategic position.
In the competitive landscape of Canadian public service advertising, campaigns addressing child safety have historically leaned on graphic consequence-based storytelling or direct appeals to fear. The approach taken by Cossette for Children of the Street Society departed from that convention by implicating the audience in a familiar action — sharing a photo — rather than positioning them as passive observers of someone else's danger. This reframing placed the campaign in a different strategic register from organisations such as the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which primarily operates through reporting infrastructure, and from broader awareness campaigns that treat exploitation as a distant threat. "I Shared a Photo" treated it as a proximate one, rooted in behaviour the audience recognises as their own.
Clinton Hussey directed and photographed "I Shared a Photo," bringing a documentary sensibility to material that could easily have defaulted to melodrama. The choice of a single media asset as the campaign's entire creative output reflects a disciplined approach: one precisely constructed piece of content, designed to circulate within the digital environment it is critiquing, rather than a broad multi-format campaign that risks diluting its central provocation.
Creative Director Michael Milardo led the Cossette Vancouver team, with Bart Batchelor serving as Art Director. Producers April Haffenden and Andrea MacFarlane oversaw production, while Rob Horsman contributed as Studio Artist. Chris Nielsen handled both editing and sound design, functions that in a short-form digital piece carry unusual weight — the rhythm of an edit and the texture of a soundscape determine whether an audience stays present or disengages before the message lands. Kate Chalmers served as Digital Brand Director, responsible for ensuring the campaign functioned as intended within the digital channels through which it was distributed, as documented in production records cited at thecreativesroom.com and commarts.com.
The formal decision to work in documentary register rather than scripted drama is consistent with the campaign's strategic logic. If the argument is that photo-sharing is a real and present behaviour with real and present consequences, then a visual language associated with real events reinforces that argument at the level of form. Hussey's photography grounds the piece in the texture of everyday Canadian family life, making the moment of risk visible within contexts the audience immediately recognises. The integration of editing and sound design by Nielsen into a single unified role suggests a production approach that treated mood and pacing as inseparable from the visual content, rather than as finishing elements applied after the fact. The result is a campaign whose craft serves its argument rather than decorating it.
No verified performance data for "I Shared a Photo" is publicly available. No confirmed figures for reach, engagement, conversion, or fundraising impact have been documented in public sources, and the campaign does not appear among verified entries at Cannes Lions, the Effies, the One Show, D&AD, the Clios, or the Webby Awards, as confirmed by review of those organisations' records. Cossette's own awards documentation does not list this 2013 campaign among agency honours.
What structural analysis can establish is that the campaign's design is consistent with effective public service communication. The concentration of creative output into a single digital asset is a tactic that prioritises depth of impact over breadth of reach — a rational choice for an organisation operating within the resource constraints typical of Canadian charitable bodies. The campaign's active window of one week, from March 11 to 17, 2013, suggests a launch strategy built around a specific moment of cultural attention rather than sustained paid distribution, which is again consistent with how smaller public interest organisations in Canada typically deploy digital campaigns.
The campaign's downstream legacy offers an indirect measure of its internal effectiveness. The fact that Cossette and Children of the Street Society continued their creative partnership through "Hooked" in 2015, "New Follower" in 2016, and further work in 2017, as documented in archive records at commarts.com and luerzersarchive.com, indicates that the client regarded the approach established in "I Shared a Photo" as worth sustaining and developing. That continuity is a form of institutional evidence, even in the absence of published performance metrics.
"I Shared a Photo" is a digital public service campaign created by Cossette Vancouver for Children of the Street Society, published in Canada in March 2013. It addresses the risks of sharing children's images online by reframing an everyday parental behaviour as a potential vector for sexual exploitation, targeting well-intentioned Canadian adults rather than perpetrators.
Cossette Vancouver created the campaign. Creative Director Michael Milardo and Art Director Bart Batchelor led the creative team. Clinton Hussey directed and photographed the piece, Chris Nielsen edited and designed the sound, and Kate Chalmers served as Digital Brand Director, as documented in production records at thecreativesroom.com and commarts.com.
The campaign launched in Canada in March 2013, with an active period running from March 11 to 17, 2013. It was a Canadian-market campaign with no documented global rollout. Its concentrated one-week window suggests a launch strategy built around a specific moment of public attention rather than sustained paid digital distribution.
No verified awards for "I Shared a Photo" are recorded at Cannes Lions, the Effies, the One Show, D&AD, the Clios, or the Webby Awards. Cossette's own agency honours documentation does not list this 2013 campaign. The absence of award recognition does not reflect on the campaign's strategic clarity or its role in establishing a long-running client partnership.
"I Shared a Photo" is the earliest documented campaign in a sustained creative partnership between Children of the Street Society and Cossette Vancouver. It was followed by "Hooked" in 2015, "New Follower" in 2016, and further work in 2017, as recorded at commarts.com and luerzersarchive.com, establishing the 2013 digital campaign as the founding statement of that body of work.
Clapboard assigns "I Shared a Photo" a score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strategic coherence and disciplined single-asset execution within the public interest category, balanced against the absence of verified performance data and the lack of documented award recognition from major industry bodies during or after its 2013 Canadian launch.
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