City of Denver's In Other Words campaign, created by Amélie in 2019, used facts and statistics to make underage marijuana risks tangible for teen audiences
ARCHIVEHow Denver's In Other Words Campaign Made Teen Marijuana Risks Real
City of Denver's "In Other Words" campaign is an integrated public service campaign created by agency Amélie, published in January 2019 in the United States, designed to make the real-world consequences of underage marijuana use tangible and credible to teenage audiences by translating statistics and documented risk factors into language and formats built for how young people actually consume media.
"In Other Words" represents the second-year creative execution of the High Costs initiative, a broader youth marijuana education and prevention program that Amélie launched for the City and County of Denver in 2017. Where the first phase established the campaign's strategic foundation, "In Other Words" deepened the creative approach, deploying the same core principle — that facts, rendered vividly and delivered in the right channels, are more persuasive to teenagers than abstract warnings — across a wider and more integrated media mix. The campaign comprises four documented media assets, spanning social media, digital radio, school-bus signage, mobile gaming, and digital video, as confirmed by the campaign's archived record.
The City of Denver's decision to sustain investment in a multi-year youth campaign reflects the seriousness with which local government in the United States has approached cannabis education since Colorado's legalisation of recreational marijuana created new challenges around youth access, perception, and use. In the United States, the task of countering teen normalisation of cannabis falls heavily on city and county public health departments, making integrated public service campaigns like this one a critical instrument of municipal policy. "In Other Words" operates squarely in that space — a Denver youth campaign engineered not to alarm, but to inform, with a Clapboard Score of 78 out of 100.
Amélie grounded the High Costs program, and by extension "In Other Words", in a specific and disciplined creative strategy: lead with facts, not fear. The agency's documented approach, as confirmed by ameliecompany.com, held that teenagers respond to concrete information that connects marijuana use to outcomes they care about — school performance, athletic eligibility, social relationships, motivation, and long-term goals — rather than to exaggerated health warnings that savvy young audiences discount immediately.
This strategic position was well-calibrated to the United States environment in 2019. Colorado's legalisation of recreational cannabis, which took effect in 2014, had introduced a particular challenge for public health communicators: legal availability for adults creates a cultural normalisation effect that makes abstinence messaging harder to sustain among teenagers. City of Denver's public service campaign needed to cut through that noise without triggering the reflexive disengagement that heavy-handed anti-drug advertising has historically produced in teen audiences. Campaigns built on scare tactics, associated most visibly with legacy approaches from organisations like DARE, have faced sustained criticism in American public health research for limited effectiveness among adolescents. By contrast, the High Costs framework positioned marijuana awareness as a straightforward cost-benefit conversation: here are the documented consequences, here is what is actually at risk.
The integrated channel strategy reinforces this intent. Placing cannabis education messaging on school-bus signage, within mobile gaming environments, and across digital radio — as documented via adsoftheworld.com — means the campaign reaches teenagers in contexts they inhabit voluntarily, rather than in spaces they associate with institutional authority. That channel logic is itself a strategic statement about who this campaign is actually trying to reach and what it respects about its audience.
"In Other Words" takes its name from a creative mechanism: the restatement of abstract statistics as lived, specific consequences that a teenager can picture happening to them or someone they know. The campaign's documented approach, per adsoftheworld.com, involves taking clinical or data-driven facts about underage marijuana use and translating them into language that makes the risk immediate rather than theoretical. That translation work is the core creative act of the campaign, and it demands both precision and empathy — precision to honour the underlying facts, empathy to understand what consequence actually resonates with a sixteen-year-old.
The media assets span social media, digital radio, school-bus signage, mobile gaming, and digital video, as recorded in the campaign's archived materials. Each channel presents a different creative challenge. School-bus signage must work in a few words and a fraction of a second. Mobile gaming integration demands that the message feel native to the environment rather than interruptive. Digital radio requires the writing to carry full weight without visual support. The fact that the campaign maintained a coherent voice and consistent strategic argument across all five of these surfaces, while producing four distinct documented assets, reflects disciplined creative direction.
The broader High Costs initiative also produced a documented activation involving a crushed car displayed near Red Rocks, paired with an oversized edible wrapper and a direct warning message, as referenced in archived trade sources. That experiential dimension speaks to an appetite within Amélie's creative approach for physical, real-world interruption — the kind of unexpected juxtaposition that makes a statistic suddenly three-dimensional. Production credits for "In Other Words" specifically are not publicly documented beyond Amélie's role as the creative agency of record for City of Denver's youth marijuana education and prevention program from 2016 through early 2019, as noted on LinkedIn.
ARCHIVEThe High Costs program, the parent initiative of which "In Other Words" forms the 2019 phase, generated 83 million impressions, according to ameliecompany.com. That figure represents the cumulative reach of the broader multi-year program rather than a metric specific to the "In Other Words" execution alone, and no verified performance data isolating the January 2019 campaign is publicly available at this time.
What the available record does confirm is that the City and County of Denver sustained investment in this public service campaign across multiple years — from the 2017 launch of High Costs through at least the February 2019 conclusion of Amélie's documented involvement with the account, per LinkedIn — which is itself a meaningful signal. Municipal public health budgets face continuous competition for resources, and multi-year campaign continuity in the United States typically indicates that internal stakeholders assessed earlier phases as generating sufficient value to justify further investment.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on its channel specificity and its respect for the audience. Placing a cannabis education message inside a mobile gaming environment — where teenage attention is genuinely present and voluntary — is a more demanding and more credible form of reach than a public service announcement placed in a context teenagers actively tune out. The use of digital radio extends that logic. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 78 out of 100 reflects strong strategic coherence and channel intelligence, with room that remains, as with most public-sector campaigns, in the area of independently verified outcome measurement against specific behavioural indicators among Denver youth.
"In Other Words" is an integrated public service campaign created by Amélie for the City of Denver, published in January 2019 in the United States. It is the second-year execution of the High Costs youth marijuana education program, using documented facts to make the consequences of underage marijuana use concrete and relevant to teenage audiences across multiple media channels.
Amélie created the In Other Words campaign for the City and County of Denver. The agency held the youth marijuana education and prevention account from May 2016 through February 2019, according to LinkedIn, and launched the parent High Costs initiative in 2017 before producing this second-phase execution.
The In Other Words campaign ran across social media, digital radio, school-bus signage, mobile gaming, and digital video, as documented on adsoftheworld.com. This multi-channel approach placed marijuana awareness messaging in environments where teenagers engage voluntarily, rather than in institutional contexts they are likely to dismiss or ignore.
The High Costs program generated 83 million impressions in total, according to ameliecompany.com. That figure reflects the broader multi-year initiative rather than the In Other Words phase alone. No verified performance data specific to the January 2019 campaign is publicly available as a standalone metric at this time.
Amélie's strategy centred on translating statistics about underage marijuana use into specific, lived consequences teenagers could picture affecting their own lives. Per ameliecompany.com, the High Costs framework connected cannabis use to outcomes teens care about — school, sport, friendships, and future goals — rather than relying on exaggerated health warnings.
City of Denver's In Other Words campaign received a Clapboard Score of 78 out of 100. The score reflects strong strategic coherence and intelligent channel selection across its integrated media mix. The primary area where additional data would strengthen evaluation is independently verified behavioural outcome measurement among the Denver youth audience the campaign targeted.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
