Why is this work relevant for Integrated?

We had a bold and singular idea for tackling one of the biggest health challenges facing Australian youth — to mobilise an army of consumers to join in the fight against youth suicide and Sip Selflessly. More than just a multichannel campaign, this non-traditional idea saw us create a whole new product from scratch and then tackle the challenge of selling as much of it as possible.

Background

Youth suicide is the #1 killer of young Australians. It’s a complex and nuanced health issue with no straightforward health and wellness product to address it. But while there is no silver bullet to address this health crisis, there is something we can do to fight it — funding youth mental health programmes to save young lives.

Describe the creative idea

We created Mood Tea — a new consumer product that donates all profits directly to funding these programmes, while also promoting the good they do. After developing and branding our product, we advertised it telling the mental health stories of real young people, normalising help seeking behaviour with the campaign line: Sip Selflessly. We then sold Mood online via subscription, ensuring regular funding for mental health programs for years to come

Describe the strategy

Naturally, the target for Mood Tea was tea drinkers. However, we identifed a gap in the market to target a younger tea drinking consumer in 18-29 years old. The majority of brands either played off their old school and traditional associations (Twinings or Yorkshire) or were tapping into the health and wellness market (Puka, Tea2). No other brand was offering a tea that looked as modern or cool. The issue area of youth mental health, also made for a perfect brand fit and targeting strategy for younger Australians. The brand idea of Sip Selflessly and film creative, spoke to this audience – it was unexpected, surprising and defied category tropes. We began with a soft industry launch for the media and advertising industry. Once we had built a support base and ironed out any product and service issues, we took the product mass, with a fully integrated ATL campaign.

Describe the execution

We developed our product over 6 months. First, we tested and iterated our flavours with tastemakers from our target market, developing flavours like Get On Up and Be Kind Unwind, with ingredients proven to bring health and wellbeing benefits. We named and branded Mood to create a connection between at-risk youth and our millennial audience. On TV, our launch campaign reimagined the mental health stories of real young people, aiming to normalise help seeking behaviour while encouraging consumers to ‘sip selflessly’ when they bought Mood Tea. For radio we used creative audio editing, morphing the stories of at risk youth to drive greater awareness of how young mental health problems develop. In OOH we created bold visuals to show the direct connection between sipping Mood Tea and helping at risk youth. We designed our website to communicate our brand mission and drive repeat purchase via subscription, ensuring regular donations.

List the results

In only a few months we brought a social impact brand to the mainstream, directly impacting the lives and mental health of young Australians one cup of tea at a time. We had $10 Million in media inventory donated by 39 media outlets. Sales increased by 175% during the campaign period compared with the previous period. Online store sessions were up 393% over the same time period. We have funded 1368 hours of mental health programs with 13-18 year olds. Response from the young participants: 87% saying it was important to hear from young people with lived experience 89% feeling more equipped to look out for their mates “it’s empowering hearing other people’s stories – it’s like yes, they can do this so can I.” - participant of the Mood funded program. However, true success is building a sustainable long-term funding model for youth mental health.