Taking a step to build inclusive campaigns

The Take a Step campaign from headspace reaches out to young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across cities and rural areas. The ongoing campaign delivered by Brisbane agency Carbon Creative gives young people tools and support to improve and maintain their social and emotional wellbeing. Its direction and execution were a result of a new and purposely inclusive approach to building stories and connections between clients, creative agencies and communities.

With its planning going back to late 2019, the campaign’s production was significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular creative and cultural result that may not have come about without it.

Brett Reardon, Head of Brand Marketing and Communications at headspace, and Wayne Denning, Managing Director of Carbon Creative, discuss the origins of Take a Step. They also dive into how the pandemic influenced its direction and how building strong cross-generational relationships was key to telling an authentic health message. 

Giving voice to a national crisis

Brett: About three years ago, the Hon Ken Wyatt AM contacted us to start a campaign speaking openly and directly about mental health to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth and that contributed to establishing help-seeking methods. Core to the campaign’s success was to approach it with authenticity and cultural integrity. This couldn’t be like previous conversations. We needed to talk about western concepts around mental health in a new context, in a new cultural framework. This is why we approached Wayne at Carbon Creative.

Working within Indigenous land rights for over a decade, Wayne Denning saw a way to make a larger impact by establishing his own creative agency: Carbon Creative. Their work with headspace was based on an emerging and more symbiotic method of developing a campaign. It involved a flat hierarchy between Carbon Creative and headspace, while relying heavily on the expertise and contributions of community partners, including the Wominjeka Youth Reference Group, Marumali Consulting and the headspace National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group.

Wayne: Our work and approach as an agency has been based on supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, but now expands to give a voice to the disenfranchised, disadvantaged, and unheard. That connection between our clients and the people involved in our campaigns is what we strive for. It’s a mutual and respected situation.

Brett: And that’s what we knew we needed for this campaign. I think it’s easy for any marketing team to default to an agency they know already. Working with Carbon Creative has shown me the power of seeking people who are experts in their field but also advocates for your audience. We actually were partners in this process. There was no hierarchy because we wanted that two-way conversation. It was never going to work with that one-directional relationship of agency and client. I’m really thankful for that relationship because it’s formed such a great campaign.

Building opportunities to yarn

Take a Step is built around a core creative concept, using rocks which are held by people featured in the campaign to represent the at times heavy burden that mental health concerns can feel like, as well as the featured individuals’ connections to the land they were on. But the campaign builds its central voice and power through the simple pursuit of yarning and sharing of truths, stories and ideas to help when people experience tough times. 

“This is a campaign for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who understand that it’s important to yarn up and seek help when you’re not feeling too deadly,”

– headspace Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Practice & Engagement Coordinator William Oui. 

The power of the yarn shaped how headspace and Carbon Creative approached the communities involved in Take a Step. They worked closely with young people, the headspace Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders within communities. Their goal was to build a capacity and appreciation for yarning, which is carried through the campaign by the diverse voices that are featured.

Wayne: To work with a group of people like those at headspace, whose objectives are shaped by their passion – you can feel that when you’re building something, and you can feel the effect it had on the people involved in Take a Step. The Elders we spoke with would have taken on board the voices of the youth as there was that sense of sharing of life-long experiences and a commitment to embracing young voices.

Brett: Yes. The headspace way of “nothing about us without us” resonates with our young people, but this also applies to everyone. What’s the point of working in an office ideating if you’re not really speaking to people?

Wayne: The campaign was multi-generational and has gone way beyond the audience we envisioned at the start, which is why I believe it will have reaching benefits. That’s what we strive for. It’s about all Australian young people seeing themselves in the stories of those people in Take a Step. It’s the message at heart, not the individual. 

Staying flexible when things seem dark

The campaign’s initial brief of filming and representing the landscapes and stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people across the country came up against the restrictions brought on by COVID-19 in 2020. Plans to travel and have the youth reference group meet face-to-face as well as planned travels to different communities required a pivot to virtual opportunities to learn and swap stories. These changes had their own impact on the campaign’s creative direction. Meanwhile, a chance to bring people physically together in Alice Springs had its own impact due to a new appreciation for face-to-face contact – all because of some bungling of luggage from the airline. 

Wayne: We couldn’t go everywhere like we had intended, so we had to talk to a sense of familiarity in terms of the visuals of the campaign to help different audiences relate. A lot of that visual direction, like the use of rocks, came from our contributing community groups. It was important to present the perspectives of young people from various walks of life – urban and rural. You can feel isolated anywhere but how that feels in a remote setting compared to a city is important, so we used storytelling techniques that were able to bring together those simultaneous senses of shared places and experiences as well as individual landscapes. I think the result oozes that understanding.

The pandemic presented a challenge that created a level of emphasis we hadn’t anticipated – it created a new way of engaging. In some respects, these virtual yarns become quite intimate. While we crave physical connection, it certainly didn’t compromise the project as we found our time was precious together in those virtual settings, and people could focus and benefit from being comfortable in their own homes.

Brett: It’s almost like a sliding doors moment. If pandemic restrictions on travel hadn’t occurred, how different would the result have been? The brilliant campaign we have comes from the type of discussions we had online and then the impact the pandemic and other smaller circumstances had on our time in Alice Springs.

When everybody could eventually fly into Alice, all our luggage got delayed, including our camera equipment. Everybody was there and the shoot couldn’t happen. So, what everyone did – from our team to the young people – was chat to Elders and form relationships that evening. Once the tech arrived, those relationships were there and everyone felt tighter and more engaged with the result. Had that not happened I don’t think we would have got the nuanced and deeply representative campaign that we have.

Delivering hope across the country

Take a Step launched in August 2021, with a range of digital channels and physical spaces utilised to get the message out to those across the country.

Brett: The fact that people are watching our campaign videos right through shows that it resonates – engagement for this campaign is five times the industry average on YouTube for example.

We took quite a strategic approach to rolling the campaign out. Beyond our digital channels, we looked at various rural communities and asked what we could do there – looking at cinemas, billboards and other popular community areas where we could spread Take a Step’s message.

Wayne: Yeah, I was heading up to Cape York and drove past a billboard for the campaign. To be on a remote road, but one that is used heavily by the community, and see this – it was quite amazing. It’s always good to see your work but to see something like this in an area I know so well and where people are living these issues, those who are the exact people we’re trying to speak to – the delivery has been as important as the execution. 

So, do Brett and Wayne have any tips for either agencies or organisations looking to build inclusive campaigns? 

Brett: One piece of advice for any team planning a creative campaign like this: whatever time you have for consultation with community members – double it. When you’re creating something like this from scratch for a community with specific needs, you should never underestimate the time it needs to get it right and allow space for ideas and truth-telling to grow.

Wayne: This project reinforced the importance of the motto: understand, adapt and move. In the face of the pandemic, we gave ourselves time to breathe, time to adapt. Timeframes for the project drifted, but we adapted and the project benefitted from this breathing. That patience and approach is needed more now than ever.

Find more information about Take a Step on the headspace website.