Our Watch’s The Line Shows Teens Relationship Drama Can Feel Like The End Of The World, But Isn’t, In New Campaign Via Clemenger Bbdo

Our Watch’s youth initiative, The Line, has launched ‘It Feels Like the End of the World’, a new behaviour change campaign developed with Clemenger BBDO, an Omnicom Oceania agency, and shaped by an extensive evidence base and direct co-design with young people.

The attitudes that can lead to disrespect and control in adult relationships are often formed in adolescence. But the emotions beneath them – jealousy, fear of rejection and anger – arrive long before young people have the tools to navigate them. The new 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.

The insight is simple: when you’re 15, these feelings can genuinely feel 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.

[ANGER film]

The visual language was deliberately heightened. Working with Finch and director Andy Baker, the team chose 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 and a heightened illustrated world, where the emotions spiral uncontrollably. The shift between the two is the device that dramatises the gap between what’s actually happening and what it feels like from inside a 15-year-old’s head.

[JEALOUSY film]

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.

The stories and visual worlds were shaped alongside teenagers, whose own experiences and imaginations helped bring the work to life.

Says Patty Kinnersly, Chief Executive Officer, Our Watch:

“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.”

[REJECTION film]

Says Tiger Hongmung, Art Director, Clemenger BBDO:

“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.”

Says Georgia Payne, Copywriter, Clemenger BBDO:

“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.”