Teens are being bombarded with mental health messaging. Too much of it. Too conflicting in message. Too focused on struggle. But teens already take care of their minds every day. They just don't call it that.
The Ad Council and BBDO New York set out to change that. Working directly with teens, they created zill: a word for any action that shows love to your mind on good, bad, or whatever days.
Lupine's job: bring zill to social. Speak teen, natively, not translated for the feed. Put the power back in their hands. Call it the anti-doomscroll.
We chased four goals as we launched and grew the campaign's social presence:
ENGAGE: Spark real conversations about mental health, one-on-one and one-to-many, with teens.
GROW: Build the audience from zero. Grow awareness of zill through content that lands, smart community plays, and brand moments that actually are real.
SOLIDIFY: Lock in the message and the voice. Consistent content, real engagement, across every channel.
LISTEN / LEARN: Mine social for new insights. Use what we learn to sharpen the message and deepen engagement as the channels mature.
The social strategy started with one insight: teens already have a social language. We just needed to speak it back.
Two core audiences:
Top platforms across both groups: YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram.
Shared psychographics:
Every decision after this- channel priority, content format, posting cadence, traced back to how these two groups actually use social.
The hardest part: building one brand voice that speaks to two different teen audiences without losing either one. We solved it by anchoring every piece of content in the psychographics both groups share, then flexing format and tone by platform to meet each audience where they actually are.
Our north star: come zill with us.
An invitation, not a lecture. A way for teens to discover zilling by learning from the pages or just taking a breather on them. This solved a real tension: how do you promote mental wellness on the same channels teens are told to put down? We didn't try to keep them scrolling. We built content as the break from the scroll.
Our Execution
We built the organic campaign across four channels, each with its own job.
From there, content lived in three pillars, built as ongoing franchises instead of one-off posts. That gave each channel a shape teens could recognize and come back to, while keeping everything tied to zill's core message.
Every piece delivered a moment of peace, reflection, education, or action, backed by mental health experts every step of the way. But we didn't stop there. Ad Council and Lupine also brought in a teen advisory council: real teens, not stand-ins. They told us what landed, what felt off, and which words and spaces actually rang true. That's how we kept the work in the voice of the people we were trying to reach.
The strategy worked. zill became part of the conversation, real and usable, across every channel we built for it. Teens got a new lens on mental health and new habits to go with it.
Here's how each objective played out:
