Open Up Crisps

Client: Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM)

Put simply, lager drinking blokes aren’t going to want to engage with their mental health when they’re in the pub with their mates having a laugh. However…

CALM, Beavertown and Creative Comms Agency Here Be Dragons worked together to create ‘Open Up’ - a range of co-branded crisps designed to be shared in order to help enable difficult conversations and support better mental health in the pub environment.

We focused on males aged between 25 and 40, a group at high risk of suicide, the most at risk of shelving difficult conversations, and importantly one with which Beavertown has fantastic credibility and reach. Using the known pub behaviour of opening up a packet of crisps for the table, each ‘Open Up’ bag contained conversation starters acting as a Trojan Horse to guide conversations between mates and tease mental health into an environment, and audience, that is notoriously difficult to engage with this topic.

Research was undertaken to ensure strategic integrity, and Beavertown’s trade relationships were leveraged to ensure this project had significant scale and didn’t become a ‘token PR exercise’...eventually over 50,000 bags of Open Up crisps were produced and distributed free by bar staff in over 300 UK pubs.