The hook
The first three seconds do not open with a logo or a lesson. They drop you inside a teenager’s head, where a small snub is already becoming something bigger. The film sets up a grounded, real-world moment and then lets the first emotional surge crack it open. You are not told that the feeling is an overreaction; you are shown how enormous it is from the inside.
The structure of the film
The film moves between two registers: a grounded, real world and a heightened illustrated world where emotions spiral. That shift is the engine. Small relationship niggles turn into swarms of cabbage moths, lightning storms and endlessly spinning rides. The style, developed with Finch and director Andy Baker, is deliberately dramatic and stylised rather than literal. The internal world is not presented as a threat; it is presented as visceral and consuming, which is exactly how it feels when you are living inside it.
The campaign is built around an interactive experience, not just a film. That experience helps young people work through their own “end of the world” feelings and offers expert-led guidance to pause, regulate and communicate.
The idea and the brief
Our Watch’s youth initiative, The Line, launched this work with Clemenger BBDO, an Omnicom Oceania agency, shaped by evidence and direct co-design with young people. The brief was to build emotional literacy before harmful attitudes take hold. The insight is that at 15, being left on seen can genuinely feel like the end of the world.
Patty Kinnersly, Chief Executive Officer at Our Watch, puts the goal plainly: most young people understand respectful communication, but they need confidence to do it when emotions run high.
Art director Tiger Hongmung says the team did not want to tell young people to calm down. They wanted to make the feelings as ridiculously big as they actually feel. Copywriter Georgia Payne adds that working with teenagers was “as inspiring as it was humbling”.
Where it is running
The launch material does not break out paid placements or channels. What it does make clear is that the centrepiece is an interactive experience, with website production by Today and media handled by Atomic 212. The film and the experience are designed to meet young people in the spaces where those intense feelings actually show up.
Steal this
Three moves from this campaign for a smaller brand:
- Make the internal state the visual. Stop showing the argument; show the weather system inside the customer’s head.
- Co-design the world. The stories and visual worlds were shaped alongside teenagers, not just tested on them.
- Close the loop with a tool. The film opens the feeling, but the interactive experience gives the audience something to do with it.
Watch the original: Our Watch on YouTube
Source: Campaign Brief
