Cybercrime is ‘big business”. And it is hurting honest businesses of all sizes. M&C Saatchi Group UK and The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), in partnership with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), have launched a campaign, Cyber Resilience, to increase awareness, consideration and uptake of Cyber Essentials certification among UK businesses.
At the heart of the creative idea is the insight that cyber attacks can happen to any business, anywhere. The campaign makes this engaging by placing everyday businesses in far-flung and fantastical locations, including on the moon, underwater and on the side of a cliff trying to evade the threat of cyber criminals. Dramatic, photo-real landscapes juxtapose the extraordinary with the familiar, reinforcing the message that nowhere is out of reach from cybercrime.
Each execution captures a moment in time, with subtle, eye-catching details that add richness to the scenes while quickly landing a simple story: no matter where your business operates, hackers can still reach you.
The multichannel push responds to a growing gap between cyber threats and UK businesses defences. In 2025, over four in ten UK businesses experienced a cyber breach, yet many SME leaders continue to believe that their size or scale makes them less of a target. The work positions cyber security not as a purely IT issue, but as a core business imperative.
The Cyber Resilience campaign aims to encourage businesses to take practical action by signing up to and completing Cyber Essentials, the government-backed cyber security certification. The 2025–26 campaign focuses on increasing awareness and uptake of the scheme, driving more users to the website and boosting certifications over 24 months, with a particular focus on small and medium-sized enterprises and a secondary audience of larger organisations.
The campaign used a blended production approach, combining live-action photography capture with AI-driven post-production. Movements were captured on set and then taught to an AI system, with a photographer, AI artist and motion designer collaborating to build original, realistic environments and moving assets. The approach delivered greater flexibility, variety and value for money. The work is running across social, digital and radio channels in the UK. Media planning is handled by MGOMD, with buying by OmniGOV.
Clare Richardson, Client Partner, M+C Saatchi Group UK, stated, “Cultural Power is about understanding the real forces shaping behaviour and using creativity to move people towards better choices. This campaign taps into a simple but powerful truth: distance and scale don’t protect you from cybercrime. By making that reality impossible to ignore, the work helps shift cyber security from a background concern to a business priority.”
Richard Morgan, creative director, M+C Saatchi Group UK, added, “Cyber resilience probably isn’t top of most business owners’ minds right now, with everything else the economy is throwing at them, but the truth is, it’s more vital than ever. Our challenge was to break through the daily barrage of communications our decision makers faced and land cyber security certification like a lunar module in their news feeds. Unfortunately, a shoot on the moon’s surface (or Mariana Trench) was out of bounds, so we enlisted the powers of AI wizards and an epic landscape photographer to bring our out-of-this-world campaign to life. The result: a bold new production approach and a piece of work that dares to go somewhere different.”
Credits
Agency: M&C Saatchi Group UK
Creative Director: Richard Morgan
Senior Copywriter: Ric Hooley
Senior Art Director: Dan Lacey
Creatives: Andy Thirsk & Conor Barry
Project Director: Emily Henderson
Design: Paul Venn
Motion Design: Craig Barbour & Sayeed Islam
Client Partner: Clare Richardson
Account Director: Elise Goodwin
Senior Strategy Director: Lucy McCarthy
Photographer: George Logan
Agent: Horton-Stephens
AI Artist: Alys Thomas
Motion AI artist: Titouan
Sound: Little things sound studios
Sound Engineer: Charlie Cooper
Sound Producer: Lindsay Grant
Retouching: Jake Hickman @ Neon Beast
Media Planning: MGOMD
Media Buying: OmniGOV
