The Real Project Teen

In my Advertising Strategy class, our semester centered around creating a campaign to prevent substance abuse among middle school students in two rural counties in Florida.

I had the unique opportunity to conduct a focus group at Liberty Middle School. We formulated pages of questions, but the one our team thought was the least important ended up being the key to our campaign. The last question we asked was “If you had a superpower to stop your peers from using substances, vaping, etc, what would it be?” the most popular answer: X-ray vision. Not mind control, freezing, or invisibility—students simply wanted their peers to “see what they were doing.” We took that insight and ran with it.

When this project was briefed to me, I immediately thought of how educators have structured education. Over time, sex education has become an increasingly important topic for parents and students, with students even feeling like it is their right to know about the outcomes of being sexually active. We wanted our students to feel the same way about alcohol and substance use— to feel entitled to know what happens.

So, we created an empowerment campaign: “It’s your right to know what you’re putting in your body.”

Staying away from scare tactics, we used bright imagery and even invented a character, Steve, an X-ray skeleton that appears on posters and social media. Steve explains the effects of drugs and alcohol, delivering a clear message about their long-term impacts.