Awards Spotlight: How Diageo painted a relatable picture of underage drinking

The winner of the second annual ‘Best Responsible Digital Engagement with Kids & Teens’ category at The Drum Awards for Digital Industries, sponsored by SuperAwesome, global head of sales Lee Veitch sat down with Collingwood Learning’s managing director Chris Simes and We Are Tilt’s director and head of creative strategy Paul Mallaghan to find out more about this award-winning work.

Up against the competitively short-term buzz of most social media campaigns, they faced the challenge of creating something that would stay with young people in the long-term. So they set themselves the bold task of developing an e-learning module and associated campaign, drawing on the principles of its early work which uses drama as a learning tool. From this, the campaign ‘Smashed’ was born.

“We put out a very rough-and-ready version when Covid-19 hit, and we reached 18,000 young people in about six weeks,” says Simes. “We knew it was something that was very much needed and so, we’ve worked together to develop what you now see which is Smashed Online”.

The campaign’s success was in part due to the way it speaks directly to young people – not their parents. For Mallaghan, it was incumbent to ask, “what is the best way to create an experience that young people are actually going to understand, relate to, enjoy and feel changed and motivated to think about things in a different way?”

One step to achieving this was consulting with young people around their real-life, lived experiences with drinking, which fed into the script and adaptation of the campaign for 30 countries, using the universal language of storytelling.

In listening to young people, they learned to avoid making it overly dramatized. “It’s a story that can resonate with young people, but also young people in different cultures, with slightly different pressures”, explains Mallaghan. “To me that was the most interesting challenge – you want to reflect the way young people use social media [...] at the same time, you have to be very careful, because this it's not something that you can go, ‘let's look at the latest meme’”.

“We wanted it to be something where yes, a young person can engage with it directly and learn from it, but if a parent is sat next to them at the same time it can prompt discussions between them around what the parent’s role is in educating their child around the issue,” adds Simes.

At its core, ‘Smashed’ fills an educational and social need, brings down the barriers for educators, and encourages participation in the underage drinking conversation at multiple levels.

For a deeper dive into this campaign, watch the full interview at the top of this page.