Our problem was two-fold.

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.

Secrecy, censorship, and misinformation had lead to a vaping epidemic, and allowed big tobacco to tighten its grip on a generation of young Australians. They needed to hear the truth.

But the vape companies were doing everything they could to hide it.

While nicotine was prohibited in recreational vapes in Australia, big tobacco found a loophole. They simply removed ‘nicotine’ from the warning labels, not the vapes, and continued to target children with insidious online tactics and colourful packages and flavours like ‘fairy floss’.

Australian law simply wasn't tough enough.

To attract the attention of government, and speak to young people in a language they would understand, we hijacked the government's own platform. Warning labels.

We invited young Aussies to rewrite the warnings in their own words, Rather than warnings from faceless legislators, we wrote warnings from the heart. We got young Australians whose mental and physical health had been affected to write their own warning labels, presenting them to peers and decision makers while reforms took shape.

From the young people who featured:

Croz, 18: “It's up to our generation to sort of tackle this problem because we're the most affected by it. A warning label sort of encapsulates how young people are fighting for young people.”

ANNABEL, 20: “I think young people's voices will be the most important in tackling the vaping crisis. We're the ones it's impacting. We're the ones going to be suffering the consequences."

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

So we had to find a way to warn Australian youth about the dangers of vaping without feeling patronising and reframe how they perceived it, from a cool and harmless habit to a lame and dangerous behaviour.

As a philanthropic organisation without the usual government red tape, Minderoo challenged us to do it differently. We needed to get the warning out to a hard-to-reach youth audience in a way that felt authentic to their generation - empowering them to confidently say no to vaping.

Our PR strategy was to infiltrate youth culture and spread our health messages through:

1 - Influencers they admire (eg. Abbie Chatfield)

2 - Creators they relate to (eg. Mr Sikhant, Angelo Marasigan)

3 - Youth media they trust and engage with (Pedestrian.tv)

We launched UNCLOUD.ORG, a platform for young people to warn others of the horrors of vaping addiction and help them see the truth. We recruited Young Australians suffering mental or physical health problems from vaping, to front our project by writing the warning labels they were never given. In a language they understood.

Their own.

Over an initial 3 month launch period, this non-traditional approach invited kids to submit their own labels, which exponentially built a bank of powerful vape warnings, written from the heart. Then we amplified those through online film, social, out-of-home, in-venue, and in-gaming advertising in some of Australia's biggest online games. All the places they'd normally see vapes.

The warnings were also presented to the Australian Government throughout a series of meetings, letting them hear from the youngest victims of vaping themselves, what they wanted others to know.

Our campaign has generated more than 270 million impressions and counting, with more than 130,000 young Australians actively engaging with the UNCLOUD platform to date, either sharing messages or accessing Quitline as a direct result.

More than 70% of young Australians say the campaign grabbed their attention, and more than 65% took action after seeing the campaign, either starting a conversation with peers, or taking actions to stop vaping for good. The highest results were amongst regular vapers - with 84% taking some action as a result of the campaign.

The Victorian State Government in Australia has since adopted the campaign and its assets, and plans to fund and continue to run it indefinitely due to its success.

Its legislative impact has been immense, playing a role in the formation of Australia's tough vaping laws, but its behaviour-changing impact will continue to be felt for generations to come.