Objectives

Suicide is the second leading cause of death amongst young adults. 

Young adulthood is a critical time in a person’s life when they may experience greater stress from life changes like leaving high school, moving from home and starting college, or entering the workforce. It’s also a time when mental health issues frequently emerge. Despite effective treatment options, there are often long delays between the first appearance of symptoms and when people seek counseling or treatment. 46% of young adults age 18-25 with serious mental illness did not receive counseling or treatment.

The good news—76% of young adults will turn to a peer in a time of crisis for support. That means the friends of those struggling can be incredibly influential in helping them get the help they need. Younger generations are ready to crack open the cultural conversation about mental health, but they’re missing the language and resources to do it.

To address this, the Ad Council, the Jed Foundation (JED) and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) launched Seize the Awkward, a national public service campaign. Seize the Awkward aims to empower 16 to 24-year-olds to help their friends who are struggling with mental health issues and who may be at risk for suicide.

Strategy and Execution

The Insight -

• In conversations with young adults, we learned that friendships are everything to teens.
• When they open up and are vulnerable with each other, it creates a powerful new space of trust between them that doesn’t just lead to important mental health conversations, but that also strengthens their friendships.

Our strategy -

• This powerful insight led our strategy. It’s about friendships and giving young people a way to change the culture of mental health one friendship at a time.
• The creative idea: Seize the Awkward – aims to empower young adults to start a conversation about mental health if they suspect a friend is struggling, even if it may feel uncomfortable or awkward at first.

Implementation – tone

• The campaign approaches a sensitive and serious topic with an upbeat tone to encourage young people to start the conversation about mental health.
• In taking a lighter, more upstream approach, Seize the Awkward hopes to make the content more relatable and approachable to the target audience of 16- to 24-year-olds.

Implementation – talent

• Given how incredibly influential digital and traditional talent is to our target audience, a significant component of the campaign is a series of videos from top talent for YouTube and other social channels.
• Our latest video, which coincided with Mental Health Awareness Month, features No.1 Billboard artist Billie Eilish speaking out about her personal experience with mental health issues, how friends have supported her and the importance of reaching out to a friend when you notice something is off.
• With a notable talent like Billie Eilish speaking out about her mental health story, we hoped to normalize the issue and encourage viewers to reach out to their friends and start their own conversations.

Results

Billie Eilish Video Results

• The Billie Eilish Personal Story video has amassed a total of 3.7 million views, 731K impressions, 494K comments. To date, we’ve received 61 pieces of press coverage and a 4000% increase of uses of the #SeizetheAwkward hashtag, with 9-10K coming from retweets of announcement of the video on Twitter.
• Other top tier talent such as Cara Delevigne have shared a quote from the video on Instagram, expressing their support

Campaign Results

• Overall, the campaign website has now had over 427K sessions while the Instagram page has had over 171K profile visits since launch.
• In a continuous tracking study, 35% of respondents are aware of the campaign PSAs. 78% of respondents with a friend who has struggled with mental health have helped their friend or found some else to help them. 70% of respondents have talked to a friend about their personal mental health, in the past 6 months.
• The campaign videos have garnered more than 21.5 million views, 1.1 million likes, 39.1K shares, 41.9K social mentions, 34.6K hashtag uses and 1.2B total impressions.

Media