Telling teenagers not to do something is one of the surest ways to get them to do it. So when Maryhaven needed an anti-vaping campaign that would actually land with Gen Z, we threw out the PSA playbook and wrote a comedy series instead.
Maryhaven is one of Ohio's largest behavioral health organizations, and they came to us with a real challenge. Their anti-vaping campaign needed to break through to teenagers, an audience famously immune to direct messaging about their health choices.
Our approach inverted the usual PSA structure. Instead of telling kids what not to do, we showed them how silly the consequences of vaping look from the outside. Three short comedic reels, each one focused on a different impact: physical health, mental health, and personal finances. A father-son duo carried the recurring narrative, with the dad calling out exactly how dumb his son's vaping habit looks in real life.
Wrote a full three-reel arc with consistent characters, escalating stakes, and a clear comedic POV before stepping on set.
Used AI image generation to map out lighting, setting, and tone before the shoot. Kept everyone aligned on the visual feel.
Shot in vertical format from the start. No square reformatting, no 16:9 crop. Native to the platforms teens actually use.
Anti-vaping campaigns fail when they sound like adults trying to talk to teenagers. They succeed when they sound like teenagers laughing at themselves. The Maryhaven series leaned into the latter, hard.
Casting a relatable father-son dynamic gave the comedy a real-world frame. Scripting each episode around a different consequence avoided lecture fatigue. And shooting on vertical, scroll-native format meant the reels actually played the way teens consume content, not the way grant proposals describe content.
Why nonprofits hire us: Anti-vaping campaigns are a difficult brief. Teens see through anything that feels parental, official, or earnest. The format choice matters as much as the message. Comedy gave Maryhaven permission to be honest without being preachy.
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