ABOUT

Whether it's physical isolation, exclusion from group chats, being blocked on social media or family breakdowns, Childline truly understands that children and young people can experience loneliness in many ways. And that feeling lonely really impacts their emotional and mental health.
Young people told us that their loneliness wasn't taken seriously. They struggled to have their feelings understood, or to find somebody to turn to. It felt like loneliness was something to be endured and hidden away.
With this campaign we wanted to show that anybody can feel lonely, and that Childline is there to listen and support young people when they need it.

We wanted to portray the reality of their lives, along with elements being deliberately ‘aspirational’ to help remove some of the stigma of loneliness - you don’t have to be alone to feel alone. By telling the ‘Day in the Lonely’ stories of three young people, from different perspectives, we could show that feeling lonely is felt and experienced in diverse ways and can affect anybody. You can still feel lonely, even if on the outside it might not seem that way, as you are surrounded by friends (like Rob) or scoring goals for your team (like Elle), or gaming with your mates (Khenan).

Borrowing from the popular social media trend for often idealised 'Day in the Life’ videos, the ‘Day in the Lonely’ subverts the genre by showing how loneliness can feel overwhelming for a young person through the course of their day - before signalling how they can get help from Childline.

We wanted to talk to our audience in a way that they’d find immediately identifiable – hence making the campaign very ‘social first’ UGC look, shooting vertical, and carrying that look across all channels (mimicking the ‘tik-tok-ification’ of a young person’s feed). We carried this aesthetic over into titles and graphics within the film, and into our display ads as well.

We created our stories with young people and asked them to feedback on our concepts, visual approach and scripts. We also captured most of our film content on phones used by our young cast, who improvised scenes to make them more relatable.
 
We did all of this because we believe the best way to let young people know Childline is here for them is by putting their voices right at the heart of our creativity.