Rhode Island loses roughly 120 residents to suicide each year, and working-age men account for more than half of those deaths, dying at over twice the rate of the general population. The Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) needed a campaign that could reach this audience without triggering the defensiveness that typically greets mental health messaging in male-dominated, high-stress trades.
Rather than starting from a creative concept, Reach started with the audience. Two focus groups with men construction, forestry, engineering, and shipbuilding tested three campaign directions. "Tough Enough to Talk" read as a challenge to masculinity and felt too confrontational. "We've Been There" resonated with some but left men worried their situation was too different to relate. The clear winner was a simple check-in: "You Good, Man?" Participants described it as catchy, low-stakes, and easy to say to a coworker without sounding like a crisis intervention.
That research became the campaign's foundation. The goal was never to teach men new language for talking about mental health, but to hand them permission to use language they already had with each other. The campaign set out to reduce stigma around behavioral health conditions, normalize peer check-ins as an act of collective responsibility rather than individual vulnerability, and drive working-age men toward concrete help-seeking resources such as the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and PreventSuicideRI.org through a media mix built around where this audience actually spends time.
Plan of action: Before writing a single line of creative, Reach conducted formative research including 52 anonymous surveys and 11 in-depth interviews with working-age men in construction, engineering, forestry, shipbuilding, and landscaping. That research surfaced a critical insight: this audience wasn't refusing to talk about mental health. They were rejecting messaging that felt scripted or performative. From there, we developed three creative concepts and tested them in structured focus groups, letting the audience's own reactions determine which direction moved forward. "You Good, Man?" won decisively, with participants describing it as catchy, low-stakes, and something they'd actually say to a coworker.
Execution: The campaign centered on a cinematic video series filmed in a real workplace environment using minimal dialogue, quiet peer-to-peer moments, and ambient sound instead of narration or statistics. The creative was built to look like a moment you'd actually witness on a job site, not an ad about mental health. Media strategy followed the same audience-first logic: an integrated buy across Meta, YouTube, Google Search and Display, streaming and connected TV (Disney, Hulu, Paramount, Roku), out-of-home placements in movie theaters and at gas pumps, organic social, and a dedicated landing page, YouGoodMan.org, that connected visitors to the 988 Lifeline and PreventSuicideRI.org. All creative and messaging was developed in both English and Spanish to reach Rhode Island's Spanish-speaking working-age men.
Key features: What set this campaign apart was its refusal to lead with crisis language or statistics. Instead of asking men to change how they communicate, it gave them permission to use language they already had instead of a clinical prompt. The strategy also treated the audience as active participants rather than passive recipients: messaging emphasized that anyone could ask the question, reframing mental health support as a shared, peer-level responsibility rather than something only a struggling individual had to initiate.
Challenges: The biggest obstacle was recruiting men to participate in the research itself. Early outreach for surveys, interviews, and focus groups named "suicide" directly, and recruitment lagged because the same stigma the campaign was designed to address showed up first in our ability to study it. Men who might otherwise have engaged were hesitant to sign up for something that sounded, on its face, like a clinical or crisis-related study. We adjusted our promotional language to focus on mental health and peer support broadly rather than suicide specifically, which improved response rates and ultimately shaped how cautiously and deliberately the campaign itself introduced more serious themes like the 988 Lifeline.
Every objective set at the outset of this campaign was met or exceeded. RIDOH's goals were to reduce stigma, encourage open conversation, and increase help-seeking among working-age men and the data shows the message reached exactly who it was built for.
The campaign generated more than 6.7 million impressions across digital, streaming, and out-of-home placements, with Meta ads achieving a 3.59% engagement rate and a $0.47 cost per click, well below industry benchmarks. YouTube ads held viewer attention longer than typical health campaigns, and paid search and display outperformed industry click-through benchmarks by more than three times.
More telling than reach was behavior. YouGoodMan.org drove nearly 35,000 site visits, with 94% coming from first-time visitors, evidence that the campaign was starting new conversations, not just reaching people already engaged with mental health resources. Visitors didn't just land and leave: they triggered over 5,000 on-site actions, including downloading resources and submitting forms, signaling genuine intent to seek help or share it with someone else.
The campaign also earned unprompted validation beyond the metrics including earned media coverage across five Rhode Island news outlets. Most significantly, "You Good, Man?" has since become the foundation of Rhode Island's statewide men's mental health resource platform, proof that the campaign didn't just perform well during its media flight, but built something the state is continuing to invest in.