KPN Makes Online Shaming a National Conversation With A Piece of Me

Why KPN Bet on Brand Purpose to Reclaim Relevance in the Dutch Telecom Market

KPN held more than 36 percent of Dutch telecom-market revenue in 2023 and 2024, according to Telecompaper, making it the dominant operator in the Netherlands. Despite that market position, the brand faced a credibility gap at the brand level. Research conducted by Kantar showed that KPN was losing brand value because consumers held no clear association between the company and a meaningful brand purpose, as reported by musebyclios.com. That finding shaped the strategic brief: KPN needed to claim a domain the way Heineken owns beer culture or Nike owns sport, as described in campaign documentation cited by musebyclios.com and Brands Dentsu.

The strategic answer was KPN's #BetterInternet platform, launched in 2023 as a long-term commitment to making the internet safer, more social, greener, and more accessible, according to Little Black Book. A Piece of Me became the most significant public expression of that platform in 2024. The campaign's insight was precise: the internet, as characterised in Dentsu Creative Amsterdam's own brief and reported by contagious.com, was once invented to bring people together but has since become a space of real harm, particularly for younger users. Gen Z was both the audience most at risk from online shaming and the audience whose cultural habits — music streaming, social sharing — made a song the most credible vehicle for the message.

In a Dutch telecom market where competitors such as T-Mobile Netherlands and Vodafone Netherlands compete aggressively on network performance and pricing, KPN's decision to invest in a cause-led creative platform represented a deliberate move to compete on brand meaning rather than product specification alone. The strategy, developed with Mindshare Amsterdam and Dentsu Creative Amsterdam, was to make A Piece of Me function simultaneously as a pop song, a social-media artefact, and an educational tool — distributed through schools, charts, and streaming platforms at the same time.

Inside the Creative Craft That Made A Piece of Me a Dutch Cultural Moment

Creative Directors Gijs Sluijters and Joris Tol led the creative development at Dentsu Creative Amsterdam, working with the explicit intent of producing content that Gen Z would encounter on its own terms — in playlists and social feeds — before recognising it as advertising, as documented by musebyclios.com. The production involved Wefilm Amsterdam as the primary film production company and Amp Amsterdam for audio production, with Crabsalad Amsterdam and HPB Amsterdam contributing to the broader campaign execution, according to lbbonline.com.

The selection of MEAU as the campaign's artist was strategic rather than incidental. MEAU is a Dutch singer-songwriter with an existing audience among young people in the Netherlands, and her involvement was not a celebrity endorsement arrangement but a co-creative partnership. The song and music video were developed in direct collaboration with victims of online shaming and with subject-matter experts, ensuring that the creative output reflected real experiences rather than dramatised approximations. This grounding in testimony gave the work an emotional credibility that conventional public-service announcements rarely achieve.

Joris Tol has stated publicly, as reported by musebyclios.com and Group Dentsu, that Dentsu Creative's relationship with KPN operates at the level of fundamental brand positioning rather than individual campaign briefs — a partnership model that allowed the creative team sufficient trust and latitude to pursue a genuinely unconventional execution. The music video was designed to function at multiple registers simultaneously: as entertainment capable of charting, as educational material shown across hundreds of schools in the Netherlands, and as a shareable social object whose organic spread was itself a demonstration of the ease with which digital content crosses private and public boundaries. The international release of the English-language version, Piece of My Soul, confirmed that the creative approach had sufficient universality to travel beyond the Dutch market without requiring fundamental reformulation.

Cannes Grand Prix, Legislative Change and the Measured Impact of KPN's A Piece of Me

KPN's A Piece of Me won the Creative Strategy Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2024, as confirmed by group.dentsu.com and famouscampaigns.com — the highest honour in that category and the campaign's most significant industry recognition. The same campaign won three Silver Lions at Cannes Lions 2024, in the Health and Wellness, Entertainment Lions for Music, and Strategy categories, according to group.dentsu.com. The campaign received ten shortlist placements at Cannes 2024, with one source, famouscampaigns.com, reporting twelve; the precise total remains inconsistent across published accounts. KPN also won D&AD Pencils before Cannes 2024, though the specific category and Pencil level are not documented in publicly available sources. The campaign additionally won Gold in the Cause-Led Influencer Campaign category at The Drum Awards, as reported by The Drum. KPN confirms the campaign received Dutch Creativity Awards recognition in 2024, though the specific category and award level are not detailed in available documentation.

Performance data reported by The Drum documents more than 16 million streams, surpassing the nine million figure cited in earlier campaign reporting. The video reached a Top 3 position in Dutch music charts, as recorded by campaign documentation. The campaign was shown in hundreds of schools across the Netherlands. Its most consequential real-world outcome was political: the Dutch Senate approved the Dutch Sexual Crimes Act on 19 March, criminalising the forwarding of intimate images without consent — a legislative development the campaign directly influenced, as documented by Clapboard's sourced campaign materials. No independently verified attribution study connecting the campaign to the legislative outcome has been publicly released, but the temporal and causal relationship is acknowledged in campaign reporting from group.dentsu.com and lbbonline.com.