Minnesota Department of Health — Room to Breathe
Creating an empathetic brand
to educate MN Youth on the harms of vaping
Naming | Branding | Campaign Creative + Media Planning
Room to Breathe, a supportive, judgment-free brand, needed to feel relatable to serve as an endorser for all youth-directed nicotine and e-cigarette prevention campaigns and resource hub for teens.
Haberman created a fresh brand identity, website and integrated platform that are playful, fun and engaging, giving teens a space that feels safe, ownable and informative.
Branding Graphics
Campaign Website
After we established Room to Breathe as a brand, the Minnesota Health Department needed an evergreen prevention and awareness campaign.
Haberman’s solution was to create bite-sized animations that combined engaging visual metaphors with authentic stories, using teen voiceovers, highlighting the impact of e-cigarettes on issues youth really care about — like mental health, substance dependence and relationships.
We know teens are tired of scare tactics, so we worked to co-create stories and identify topics of key concern through focus groups and direct conversations with local teens. The end result is a series of short vignettes steeped in real talk and relatability.
Campaign Creative
We partnered with Minnesota youth on the creation of this campaign; the input from two focus group sessions (20+ youth volunteers) helped determine campaign direction and guide script themes, and the two voice actors featured in the video spots were sourced from local youth organizations.
Data from 2020 Minnesota Youth Tobacco Survey revealed that middle and high school students’ current use of e-cigarettes remained high and essentially unchanged from 2017. The upcoming report, 2023 Minnesota Youth Tobacco Survey, is expected to be released soon, but it will still not show the full impact of Room to Breathe, which was only fully launched in 2024.
Nevertheless, we are focusing like mad to spur real, longstanding behavior change that transforms lives. Below are some of the small(er) ways we’re seeing that happen.
In just 2 months, the video campaign garnered:
- 71,000+ clicks to the website, with site traffic increasing over 204% since the launch and paid promotion of the videos
- Average time that viewers spent on website exceeded industry averages from 15% to 130%.