Adolescents are full of emotion. Jealousy, fear of rejection and anger arrive long before young people have the tools to navigate them. And they can foster attitudes that lead to disrespect and control in adult relationships.

Clemenger BBDO, Omnicom Oceania agency (OCX), and The Line, the youth initiative of Our Watch, Australia’s leader in the primary prevention of violence against women, have launched a behaviour-change campaign, It Feels Lie the End of the World, to help young people understand and manage the emotions lying beneath dangerous attitudes. The campaign aims to build young people’s emotional literacy and ability to navigate the intense feelings that come with relationships, before harmful attitudes take hold.

When you’re a teen, emotions can feel genuinely catastrophic. Rather than telling young people they’re overreacting or simply to calm down, the campaign meets them where they are, acknowledging the intensity of what they’re feeling in all its graphic, chaotic glory. Everyday relationship niggles become swarms of cabbage moths, lightning storms, and endlessly spinning rides, because that’s what they can feel like when you’re in the middle of them.

The visual language was deliberately heightened. The team worked with FINCH and director, Andy Baker, to choose a style that’s dramatic and stylised rather than literal, because these emotions aren’t real threats, but they feel visceral and consuming when you’re living with them. The brief was to make the internal world as big and grotesque as it feels, not as it looks from the outside.

That’s also why the work moves between a grounded, real-world setting and a heightened, illustrated world where emotions spiral out of control. The shift between the two dramatises the gap between what’s actually happening and what it feels like inside a 15-year-old’s head.

At the heart of the campaign is an interactive experience that helps young people work through their own “end of the world” feelings, with practical, expert-led guidance to help them pause, regulate and communicate what they’re experiencing. Teenagers shaped the stories and visual worlds, and their experiences and imaginations helped bring the work to life.

Patty Kinnersly, Our Watch CEO, stated, “Most young people recognise the importance of communicating respectfully. We need to help them feel confident doing that when a situation is difficult and emotions are running high. This campaign does that in an engaging and creative way.”

Tiger Hongmung, art director at Clemenger BBDO, added, “When you’re 15, being left on seen can genuinely feel like the end of the world. I should know. So rather than tell young people to calm down, we wanted to make those feelings as ridiculously big as they actually feel.”

Georgia Payne, copywriter at Clemenger BBDO, commented, “Working with teens to create these apocalyptic emotional worlds was as inspiring as it was humbling. Sure, they called us unc, but it was well worth it.”

Credits:

Client: Our Watch
Creative Agency: Clemenger BBDO
Media Agency: Atomic 212
Website Production: Today
Casting: Northside Casting
Live Action: Omnicom Content Experiences (OCX)
Live Action Director: Thomas Pollard (OCX)
Live Action DOP: Matteo Resta (OCX)
Offline & Online Editor: Felix Ferguson
Colourist: Martin Greer
Illustration & Animation: Andy Baker Studios & Finch Company
Sound & Music: Matt Thompson (OCX)