The situation is men in the UK don't talk enough about their mental health. 84% of men in the UK admit to bottling up their emotions, which goes some way to explaining why 76% of all suicides are male.

The brief was to remind young men it's healthy to talk about their mental health.

Our objectives were to simply reach as many young men as possible and remind them to talk to each other and, if they're really struggling, to let them know CALM is there too.

We demonstrated what people say and how they feel can be very different, in a uniquely engaging way. By exploiting YouTube’s timeline preview functionality and careful script writing we were able to hide a hidden message in one of DanTDM’s videos. And by appearing, at face value, to be one of his regular videos we were able to get his audience's eyes on the work before pulling the rug from under them and delivering our message.

Our target audience was young men aged 14-20. YouTube skews somewhat towards this demographic and DanTDM does even more so.

This is a demographic that doesn't consume regular advertising, they are cynical and can't wait to hit the skip button, so we couldn't target them with regular advertising (not to mention we didn't have the budget for regular media either).

We surprised them by disguising ourselves as content that they actually wanted to watch. And by using the timeline functionality in a way that is completely unique we were able to draw them in and get them to be active participants in revealing our message.

And they loved it.

The great thing about our idea is that it fits seamlessly into YouTube's platform. There are no clues that you are about to be hit with a serious message until it's happened.

We did this by exploiting YouTube's timeline preview functionality. We discovered how it worked (it shows the first frame of every second) and then carefully crafted a script that would sound very normal when read fully but when you have your cursor over the timeline and look at the preview the message spelt out their tells a very different story.

The video got 1.8 million views, over 100,000 likes and over 10,000 comments. #3 trending in gaming videos on YouTube. #20 trending in videos generally that day.

There was a 10% rise in calls to the CALM helpline immediately after the release of the video.

All for a media budget of £0

However, for us, it was the type of comments written in the comments section under the video that were particularly important. There were lots of people opening up in the comments section about their past or current struggles. There were also people in the comments who were offering their sympathies and support. Absolute proof that the message we were attempting to communicate resonated with the viewer 100%.