Privacy is a critical brand value for Apple, built into iPhone’s design from day one.

Over the years, Apple has become an leading industry voice and innovator in the space, raising awareness and providing industry-leading protection against the hidden yet pervasive data economy, silently profiting off of people’s data.

While these efforts have helped strengthen awareness of the issue, the data economy has doubled down its efforts to find new and sophisticated ways of collecting people’s data online.

At the same time, tech companies—feeling pressure to show off their own privacy commitments—have taken advantage of the complex topic, offering vague privacy promises with little in the way of actual protection.

This year, we wanted to shine a light on the sinister practice of online tracking and the extreme measures data collection companies take to snoop on people’s browsing activities. Alerting the world to the fact that, unlike other browsers, Safari is designed to protect against these privacy infringements. It proved a challenging brief. How do you make such a complex issue compelling and clear to a global audience? The solution was a striking visual metaphor that encapsulated the enemy in a way that was instantly relatable and yet wholly unique. With Safari being “A browser that's actually private.”

The result was a 45% search increase for Safari and a staggering 21% of viewers switching to Safari as their search engine of choice.

"Flock" presents a cinematic, dystopian film depicting the online surveillance economy and iPhone's privacy protections. The film features bird-like surveillance cameras pursuing people's browsing data before Safari's privacy protection intervenes.

The creative approach uses a clear visual metaphor to transform the invisible practice of data tracking into something tangible and immediately understandable.

Rather than relying on technical specifications, the film communicates Safari's privacy benefits through storytelling that resonates with both technical and non-technical audiences.

The film's title "Flock" and its concluding statement that Safari is "a browser that's actually private" provided journalists with a factual framework to compare privacy practices across browsers.

Several publications noted thesimilarity between the film's title and Google's privacy initiative "FLoC" (Federated Learning of Cohorts), creating additional layers of relevant discussion about privacy practices in the industry.

The campaign cemented Apple as a champion of online privacy while igniting an industry-wide shift towards better privacy protections.

The film was strategically positioned among a series of provocative brand actions. OOH issued our stance head on, paving the way for the film to pick up and evolve the narrative while bespoke digital work went straight at competitive browser users.


These actions stirred a stream of news headlines and social commentary. 33% of campaign coverage called out the biggest culprit (Chrome), while search interest for Safari rose 45% during the campaign.

Against this groundswell, Google Chrome announced changes to their privacy policies, followed by similar news from Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

The campaign drove 49 million people to apple.com to learn about Safari’s privacy protections, where Android users spent a staggering 95 seconds. Meanwhile Apple’s privacy leadership increased 61 percentage points over its biggest competitor.