DCF Advertising Blog
DCF Advertising’s NYC Teen Mindspace Campaign
If you were a teen dealing with a mental health issue like, let’s say, depression, would you feel comfortable walking into your school counselor’s office and asking for self-diagnostic brochures and fact sheets?
Hopefully many of you would, but a lot of you might be worried a friend or acquaintance would see you, or judge you, or ask you questions you weren’t ready to answer. Mental health issues, especially for teens, are still accompanied by significant stigma, and unfortunately that translates to a lot of teens not asking for and getting the information they need.
The NYC Dept of Health wanted to change this by promoting its helpline LifeNet, so they asked us to create a mental health and anti-stigma awareness campaign targeted to teens in New York City. We knew right away that we needed to reach teens where they spend the most time and where they often have the most privacy: online. We wanted to make mental health info easily accessible, shareable, and, most important, engaging.
So we embarked on creating what would eventually become the DOH’s first entirely interactive online social marketing campaign: NYC Teen Mindspace.
The campaign would be grounded in the narratives of seven fictional NYC teen characters, each of whom would have a profile on MySpace and who would chronicle his/her experience dealing with a certain mental health issue via blog posts, quizzes, videos, and photos. We sifted through demographic data, case studies, focus group transcripts, and testimonials to shape characters that would accurately reflect common issues facing New York teens.
After we had the campaign’s architecture fleshed out, we recruited a bunch of teens from public high schools around the city to serve as an advisory group. Basically, we wanted to make sure all elements of the campaign were not only not dorky, but also authentic and helpful. We didn’t want them to hold back and they certainly didn’t. They gave us input on everything from the site’s branding to the character casting to the language on the profiles to the widgets we were building.
Our goal was to create the most believable and relatable characters possible, but we also wanted to make it clear to users that these teens were fictional and that they belonged to a larger network of mental health resources. This is why we built Mindspace, a MySpace profile that serves as a hub of mental health information and which brings together all the NYC Teen characters in one place.
So far, we’ve launched three characters: Nicole, Kyle, and Stephanie. They’re dealing with dating violence, stress, and depression respectively, and the next four characters—Jamal, Trevor, Josh, Danielle—will be dealing with anger, peer pressure, and risk-taking. Media launched last week and more banner ads will run as the campaign progresses over the summer.
Next entry: Another year with Opportunity NYC
Previous entry: The world logs on to Mindspace