NCSC’s new campaign by M+C Saatchi UK shows businesses they don't need to go to extremes to protect themselves

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 looks 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.

At the heart of the creative idea is the insight that cyber attacks can happen to any business, anywhere. The campaign brings this to life 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. These dramatic, photo-real landscapes juxtapose the extraordinary with the familiar, reinforcing the message that nowhere is out of reach from cyber crime.

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 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. This approach delivers greater flexibility, variety and value for money. It ensures every pound works harder, allowing the ‘Cyber Resilience’ message to reach audiences in a compelling and cost-effective way.

The work is running across social, digital and radio channels in the UK. Media planning is handled by MGOMD, with buying by OmniGOV.

Further information about Cyber Essentials is available at ncsc.gov.uk/cyberessentials.

Clare Richardson, Client Partner, M+C Saatchi UK, said: “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 cyber crime. 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 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.”