UNICEF #FROMMYANGLE

When 10 young people showed up in our studio to make a video about their mental health, we did not expect their voice to resonate globally, and then UNICEF surprised us and offered a platform to make the problems of young people in Serbia heard around the world.

In August, when we were tasked with helping UNICEF raise young people’s awareness of their mental health, we didn’t know how complex the situation was.

There are 56,000+ posts on Instagram under #MentalHealth. However, only adults appear in the comments.

We came across a bunch of memes, sarcastic content, self-deprecating humor with a huge number of comments, likes and tags of our demographics.

However, in the comments there are only a bunch of tags and a couple of smileys.

We saw that there was no real communication about what problems they were going through, but it all ended in superficial comments.

Let’s talk openly

We wanted to change the way we talk about mental health with young people in Serbia.

Young people react poorly to the messages that someone else imposes on them.

That is why we decided to take a documentary approach, where they will play the main role.

We interviewed 10 young people from different parts of Serbia who come from different cultural and social backgrounds. We have prepared the questions, and we have given them absolute freedom to show us how things are from their perspective.

The whole campaign carried the hashtag #IzMogUgla.

We wanted to show young people that their problems are not only uniquely theirs, but that all their peers are going through similar situations.

We didn’t hire actors, we hired real people with real problems.

After the hero video was released, we used the quotes to promote the content in the form of static Instagram posts.

We asked the question, “WHAT ABOUT YOU?” to invite followers to tell us openly if they have similar problems.

We then moved the campaign to TikTok to enable young people who find it more difficult to write about their problems to show us what they are going through.

So we made a “put a finger down challenge” for this campaign.

In order to initiate this activation, we have collected influencers who have a very strong influence with our target group, and to whom the message of the campaign is important.

Influencers were not paid, but everyone supported Unicef’s activation because of the message that was close to them.

Our activation was joined by 266 young people who made their own versions of this video.

From the Unicef angle

After the campaign, we collected data from all platforms to see how many people had the opportunity to hear the message of this campaign.

On YouTube, we achieved a large number of views, which already in the first month put us in the 4th place of the Unicef Serbia profile of the most viewed videos. Currently, the video has over 120,000 views. 5 influencer videos generated over 850,000 views.

The hero video of the campaign is set as the main visual on the new svejeok.rs platform. This platform has been supported by Unicef to help young people take the most important step, which is to talk openly and inform about possible problems.

UNICEF Global was so pleased with the results of the campaign in Serbia that they decided to release a shortened version of the hero video on their Twitter and Facebook pages.

The path to a society where we all talk openly about our mental health and problems is long and unpredictable, but at least we started the first step and that is an open dialogue in person. We’ll save the memes for other topics.