Australia is facing a male mental health crisis, and The Men’s Table (TMT) charity helps by providing a safe and supportive environment for men to come together once a month to talk openly about what’s really going on for them. As a not-for-profit organisation with extremely modest budgets, brand awareness was very low, so this brief’s specific objective was to raise awareness of The Men’s Table as a place men can go to open up and have “real” conversations. Our target audience was men aged 35-60 in metropolitan and suburban Sydney.

Firstly, we needed to attract our audience’s interest with credible banter that would engage them to find out what the digital panel was all about. We then needed to conceal a heartfelt message within it, to be revealed over the 10 seconds. It was important to keep word count down too, ensuring the copy could all be read in 10 seconds. We also needed to be mindful of the spacing of the concealed message words to ensure an aesthetically typeset “reveal”. For banter, we chose typically Australian blokey subjects and wrote in a spoken colloquial style. Concealing a heartfelt message in this lighthearted banter was particularly challenging when the message contained words with negative connotations like “tough”, “pressure” and “struggling”. Ultimately, however, by starting the writing process with the concealed messages, the constraint of needing to include these challenging words inspired banter directions we may not otherwise have pursued.