A Non Smoking Generation usually informs youth on hazards of smoking in a classroom environment. But the classroom is a place where young people can be reluctant to share their feelings and concerns.

We wanted to create a campaign on fear and smoking where youth felt safe and where they could interact without having to worry about classroom hierarchies.

We turned to Minecraft, the world famous Swedish-founded online gaming platform. We built our own fear clinic on a Minecraft server and invited young people to discuss smoking and fear with each other or with our youth psychologist. We even offered privat sessions on KiK.

To make sure we weren’t perceived as intrusive, we asked a young Minecraft builder to help us construct our clinic and for vloggers to recommend the clinic to their fans. By using Minecraft as our platform and inviting the target group on their own terms, we started a new conversation on fear and smoking – ever more powerful and interesting than it could be in any classroom.

We addressed smoking in a completely new way, reaching millions. At the same time, we added curiosity and fresh thinking to the A Non Smoking Generation brand.

Our campaign period was one week.

We built a custom clinic on a dedicated Minecraft server and named it NSG Fear Clinic. For those who wanted to chat with the psychiatrist in private, messaging app KiK was used.

To highlight our fear clinic, we made a large media outreach to journalists, using a survey we saying that more than 6 out of 10 Swedish youngsters believe smokers smoke to show they’re not afraid. 

We convinced ambassadors, a mix of influencers among youth: gamers, bloggers, young tv-celebs, YouTube-stars, to post on the subject of smoking in their own channels, mainly on Instagram and vlogs. 

All outreach lead to our fear clinic on Minecraft, which was the heart of the campaign. To use Minecraft in this manner is unheard of, and in this sense, the technological platform was crucial to our success in traditional media.

In a typical Swedish classroom, there are usually about 25 persons. In one week, our clinic was visited by 10 000 young individuals. Curious kids, asking questions, making comments, advising their peers. 400 of them even took private sessions with our youth psychologist on Kik.

The hosts of one of the leading television morning news shows visited our clinic in Minecraft, live from the studio, while interviewing our client on the subject for almost ten minutes.

The total earned media reach was more than 20 million people after the campaign period. We got covered by almost every larger national media.

A Non Smoking Generation asked us for an alternative to classrooms, to start an online conversation and to find our way into the adult world.

Thanks to a Fear Clinic on Minecraft, we did.