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For We The Differents, we took an approach that sought to understand our audience, taking into account their unique situations, values, fears and viewpoints, and find a way to speak to them on their level, draw them in and get them wanting to discover and learn more.

Creating a campaign with young people as a target audience presents unique challenges. Teenagers are savvy consumers of content who have grown up with the internet, YouTube and social media profoundly embedded in their lives. This has given them an innate ability to spot inauthenticity, and an instant aversion to it. As such, campaigns attempting to reach teenagers by mimicking popular culture or trying to ‘speak their language’ often miss the mark, as teenage culture is as diverse, multi-faceted and quick to evolve as they are, and because of this it can be difficult to bottle.

At Smoke Creative, our experience creating educational content and working closely with young people has shown us one of the best ways we can reach this audience is through representation.

By showing a teenage audience that the communication is coming from themselves, or an aspirational version of themselves, we can avoid the pitfalls of appearing non-genuine and alienating our audience.

For this project we achieved this by recruiting teenagers and young adults who have positive stories around finding alternate paths with education and putting them on the screen (or their voices accompanied by animation), allowing our audience to see and hear themselves, creating a relatable and compelling experience that provides a conduit for our key messaging.

We know that what makes each young person unique is as wide and varied as their reasons for disengagement, as too are the pathways back to engagement with education. That’s why we wanted to show our audience that their ‘different’ is not just what is on display here, it is unique to them and that they will find it within themselves.

By establishing this connection with our audience, we can show them they are not alone on this search, and we are here to help by providing tools, guidance, inspiration and understanding – in the form of reassurance, of aspirational mentor figures and stories of hope and achievement, and of alternative options, ideas and fundamentals that can be found and explored on the We The Differents website.