The Campaign

It’s tempting to ‘have a moment’ when you feel overwhelmed - flip your desk, smash your laptop… but shortly after, you’re faced with the boring task of tidying up the mess or buying a new laptop - which just fuels your already high stress levels. We designed an online portal to a real-life stage where stressed out students could blow off some (virtual) steam without getting up from their chair. Stress Break was a real world space where four characters - Sloth, Robot, Hot Dog and Ghost - were tasked with channelling the stresses of the audience by destroying the space around them. We streamed the activity live for one and a half hours over 5 consecutive days with the smashes narrated by two sports style commentators, including slow-mo replays, blow-by-blow accounts and live action analysis. Students were also able to live tweet and comment about the activity, visible in a live scroll

Creative Execution

In the absence of the right ‘media’ to target this audience, we decided to create our own channel to capture their attention in an interesting way, at the right time. The Stress Break online hub became a media channel in it’s own right. The style of content encouraged students to come back to the hub daily to see what kind of crazy action might take place. With a minimal media spend, we seeded a teaser film amongst student communities, blogs and forums online. We tracked the #stressed hashtag and responded to students who sounded like they were in need. Paid digital media was used to increase scale of the campaign but paled in comparison to the impact that WOM had. The campaign spread like wildfire through stressed-out students social networks, being shared on Facebook, Twitter and, crucially, getting up-voted to the front page of Reddit.

In just 48 hours of being live we had over 198K visits to the website - a number that traditionally takes campaigns months to achieve. Over 6,500 stress break requests. Millions of students reached across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit for a minimal media spend. Quality engagement, of those who engaged with the campaign: 80% watched the live feed 80% entered a stress break 50% watched a highlights reel 43% told a friend about it 25% shared the campaign on social media Made it to the ‘front page of the internet’, Reddit where it was organically ‘upvoted’ to the top 5 - on the same day that Star Wars was released. Achieved an ‘unpaid’ PR/media value of $1.3m and reduced the stress of students that engaged by over 97%. 46% of respondents said they would consider doing a course at Deakin after seeing Stress Break.

The online hub for Deakin VCE Stress Break became a media channel in it’s own right. This campaign had to utilise an owned and earned media approach in order to make the budget work hard. The style of content we created encouraged students to come back to the hub daily to see what kind of crazy action might take place. The initial impact of the activity generated a large audience within the first few days of the live campaign, which set us up for early success.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

“In the 5 years since 2009 there has been a 42% increase in the numbers of students applying for special provisions due to significant health impairments relating to anxiety.” - Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Increasing stress levels amongst students was widely talked about in the media, but no one was helping students to reduce stress levels in the first place. Through conversations with the target audience and by tracking their online behaviour; we discovered that to counteract stress, many students had created their own coping mechanism:‘online mini breaks’. Students didn’t have time to leave their desks to de-stress so they interspersed study with scrolling through their newsfeed, seeing what’s happening on Reddit, watching videos on YouTube. In these little reprieves they’re more often than not looking for content that is humorous, mischievous and silly. We decided to employ a similar strategy to help Deakin University reach the same students.