400,000 children and young people a month are being treated for mental health problems — the highest number on record.

'Break Through Moments' supported by Mind and YoungMinds, aimed to address the fact that even though young people are carrying a lot on their shoulders, they struggle to talk about it.

Consequently, we broke the news, providing a post-news messages on three different channels where the newscaster emotionally acknowledged the difficult to digest stories told on the news.

We then went on to pause the typical programming to provide time for discussion and for families to open up to one another - in a bid to help adults talk about the issues that affect teens today.

The issues that affect and disturb young people - war, abortion, climate change etc - are typically incredibly difficult to bring up with adults. However, there was one place adults and kids experienced tough topics each day - the news.

So we decided to break the news and use it as an opportunity, providing and setting up the time and space to talk about difficult issues with one-another and 'breakthrough'.

The create idea resulted in newscaster Lucrezia Millarini taking out her earphones, breaking character, and opened up about how tough the news can be - prior to her walking off set giving audiences the time to talk to one another.

Leading to 9.1 million people across the United Kingdom opening up and having discussions about the tough topics we hear daily. We continued to expand these disruptive moments across various hard-hitting stories broadcasted across ITV, including Emmerdale’s teen abortion storyline.

Almost half of young people struggle with anxiety, and more than 400,000 children and young people a month are being treated for mental health problems — the highest number on record.

So much of this is being driven by issues we see in current affairs: wars, a climate crisis, a cost of living crisis - every night we see the world getting worse and worse, reflecting the issues our kids are worrying about today.

Our realisation: the news provides a platform for teens’ fears - but it also provides a chance for families to talk about them.

'Break Through Moments' broke the news, providing a post-news messages on three different channels where the newscaster emotionally acknowledged difficult to digest stories.

We then went on to pause the typical programming to provide time for discussion and for families to open up to one another - in a bid to help adults talk about the issues that affect teens today.

These 'Break Through Moments' took place on Friday 29th July 2022 through to Monday 1st August 2022. Each breakthrough moment used relatable topics on ITV’s programmes as a prompt to spark conversations, in a bid to help adults talk about the issues that affect teens today.

Impact on Behaviour:

- Drove more people to act than any other BGT campaign

- 9.1 million People took action. That’s 45% more people than our previous record.

- 1/3 of the people who saw the ad took action

- 30 million actions in total

Benchmark vs other ITV/BGT ads:

- Overall most memorable and appealing ITV campaign of all time

Impact on ITV:

- 2/3 of people feel more positively about ITV as a result

- 3/4 of young people felt more positive about ITV as a result

- ¼ people were more aware of our partner charities as a result