Cannabis is getting stronger and the effects of smoking it are becoming more pronounced. So the Home Office and Departments for Health and Education wanted to develop a campaign to make teenagers aware of the risks. The idea being that making them aware of the risks would encourage them to think twice about smoking.

Mother and the COI developed a campaign using the Talk to Frank brand. The TV ad featured the staff of a Brain Warehouse discussing the symptoms of cannabis use and the type of replacement brain a user might want installed. ‘Are you a puker? Then it will be the puke stopper x50.’
But there is only so much information you can credibly fit into a 40 second TV ad. And it is interrupting people so they may not want to listen.

The COI asked us to think of getting kids involved with the ad.

Our idea was to write a fly-on-the-wall documentary of life behind the scenes in the Brain Warehouse. It turned out to be a six minute comedy scripted with one of the Green Wing Team.

Obviously cannabis use is a sensitive subject and the ability to choose when and where kids could consume the content was an important consideration. So we made the show available where kids could look at it when they wanted. Online, this meant hosting it on a microsite - people got to it from an interactive trailer. On TV, this meant putting it on Sky Active which is like an on demand platform.

On digital TV 11% of 11 – 18 year olds who could interact with the show did. And over 41,000 people came to the microsite.

Interestingly there were differences between the effect that the TV had versus the video on line. TV viewers were more likely not to smoke cannabis in the future, while online viewers took out more information from the show. And they were more likely to talk about it with their friends.

We thought this was interesting. In fact it inspired an article we wrote for Admap with 2CV on how interactive advertising works. If you were interested we could talk to you about the ‘platform effect’ on the show.