Once marketed as a tool to help quit smoking, vapes have morphed into a much more dangerous trend. In recent years, they became the must-have accessory for young Aussies, promoted in underground media as a ‘harmless hobby’, despite its primarily illegal status.

But vaping is far from harmless - severe risks include nicotine poisoning, seizures, vomiting and intense anxiety. We needed to get young Australians who saw vaping as a safe and cool habit to dabble in to see vaping as an industry of exploitation, profiting off their health.

Research showed that despite growing medical evidence, traditional public health campaigns simply weren’t resonating with the youth who needed it most.

That’s where we come in. As a philanthropic organisation without the usual government red tape, Minderoo challenged us to do it differently.

Kids were never going to listen to government vape warnings.

Kids don’t listen to adults.

To change behaviour, we created a way for them to listen to each other. UNCLOUD is a hub to find peer-reviewed, scientifically-backed information about vapes, and see vaping for what it is. But, more importantly, it’s a platform for young Australians to warn each other of the horrors of vaping. After all, they’re the only ones who have felt the true impact.

Here, they shared stories of physical and mental torment, and their nicotine addiction hell. Here, they could write the warning labels they were never given.

The warnings vapes didn’t come with. All to give a generation who were insidiously targeted by big tobacco, a chance to speak out, and the truth.

They were amplified through online film, social, out-of-home, in-venue, and in-gaming advertising in some of Australia's biggest online games.

We designed a campaign for a generation indifferent to traditional health ads. To cut through, we were going to need to speak to them in the language they understood best - their own.

Secrecy, censorship, and misinformation had lead to a vaping epidemic, and allowed big tobacco to tighten its grip on a generation of young Australians. Revealing the truth is what inspired UNCLOUD’s look and feel.

The UNCLOUD brand and its design system inspired by big tobacco itself. The redacted art direction mirrors insidious redacted legal documents between big tobacco and law officials. The information they wanted no one to see.

We worked closely with young Aussies impacted by vaping to design hard-hitting warning labels, in the style of iconic anti-cigarette packaging, empowering them to share their stories with peers.

The heart of this campaign was by-youth, for-youth, so each and every placement needed to be carefully crafted to appear authentically and impactfully in their culture. For the warning labels to feel endemic, our media strategy focused on infiltrating environments where we knew they were gathering organically.

We seeded our campaign across social platforms and into their day-to-day lives, by: surrounding unis/TAFEs and nightlife districts with street posters, typically reserved for culture-driven brands,

sparking conversation in vaping fuelled pubs and bars through bespoke coasters, seeding screens and restroom activations, and priming music festival goers with hard-hitting mobile truck billboards.

We created a TikTok filter that allowed people to design and share their own warnings, amplified by influential platform creators. We even hit them when they were playing video games with mates, leveraging emerging adtech that allowed our warnings to appear on in-game billboards