News Corp’s Creativity For Good Panel pushed the importance of creating work that doesn’t just preach good but does good.
The panel at Advertising Week featured a heavyweight lineup of The Monkey’s Charlotte Marshall, The Hallway’s Simon Lee, MOOD Tea’s Kate Holland, Initiative’s Melissa Fein, and UNLTD’s Chris Freel moderated it.
Fabulously, every person on the panel had a strong message to share about the power of using your skillset to create work with purpose.
Lee spoke extensively about the success of his heartwrenching campaign, “Boys Do Cry.” An incredible campaign that was leveraged as a mental health initiative and launched in November last year.
The campaign features a reworked version of The Cure’s classic, ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ and is transformed into ‘Boys Do Cry’ sung by a group of men from various backgrounds and generations; it’s a powerful message.
The campaign was created because of Lee’s own struggles with anxiety. His agency, The Hallway, partnered with The University of Melbourne’s Centre for Mental Health, mental fitness foundation Gotcha4Life and Heiress Films to combat the stigma around men crying.
On the panel, Lee spoke candidly about the experience of creating the campaign, something he had his fingerprints on from start to finish.
He said: “It was a career-high for me! I started off as a writer, and I remain, at the core, a writer. I’d been working with some muso friends who were on board for this project, and we got to the point where we had to write some lyrics, so I thought, let’s give it a crack.
“I started with Robert Smith’s lyrics and I knew the melodic structure of the piece and the lyrics just poured out of me. We met the folks from the universal music, we played it for them and they cried. We then sent them off to Roberts Smith, and to my great delight I got a call from Universal Musical, Robert Smith loves it and we got to do it, it was awesome.”
For Lee, though, it’s about far more than just pulling off a very cool and emotional campaign. It’s about the impact, “Fifty per cent of guys, who see this campaign are more positively inclined to ask for help,” Lee shared proudly.
Fein then opened up about why Initiative decided to jump behind this campaign. She said: “The team rang me and said you have to watch this video. As a female watching that, it sent shivers through my spine.”
Fein then set out to ensure the campaign got as much reach as possible. She said: “We got the whole industry together; we got over 300 people together. We did a really bespoke briefing and lobbied the industry to get behind it.”
From there, Holland spoke about MOOD Tea, an industry-founded tea company where 100 per cent of profits go towards funding mental health projects to save young lives.
Holland shared that they decided to create MOOD Tea because why the hell not? She said: “Why not get the advertising industry together to rally around a product and sell it for good? We had 10 million dollars of media inventory, and now we’ve launched in Woolworths.”
Meanwhile, Marshall shared why The Monkeys were so keen to get involved with Tea company, and she said: “We’ve been with MOOD from the beginning! We wanted to back an industry-bred initiative. It was so nice to get together with industry people and not find holes in other people’s strategies and instead build on them.”
Marshall added: “I think personally, I’ve been on the MOOD journey from its interception. I liked using the skill set I had to do some good. It was the first time I’d taken a product from its inception to its launch.”
The panel really pushed forward that purposeful work is ultimately the most rewarding.
