City Without Drugs Foundation's 'Try not to try' campaign used an interactive digital game to simulate first-contact drug decisions for Russian audiences in
City Without Drugs Foundation Reframes Anti-Drug Messaging Through Participation
City Without Drugs Foundation's 'Try not to try' is a 2015 digital public service campaign created by Russian agency Red Pepper, designed to simulate the psychological moment of first contact with drugs through an interactive online experience, targeting audiences in Russia during a period of renewed focus on youth substance prevention.
The campaign centres on a single interactive website operating under the name ReDay. Rather than deploying graphic anti-drug imagery or conventional testimonial formats, the work places users inside a dramatised scenario featuring a young man at the threshold of his first encounter with cocaine. The participant controls the decision. That structural choice — putting the audience in the seat of agency rather than the seat of judgement — marks the campaign's most significant creative departure from standard public service advertising in Russia. According to hadock.es, a Spanish-language creative review published on April 17, 2015, the campaign was described as an 'incredible' Russian anti-drug initiative with 'a very original way of communicating.' The same review noted the campaign's central statistical claim: that forty percent of people who try drugs become addicted. This figure, surfaced within the interactive experience itself, functions less as a data disclosure and more as a psychological pressure point delivered at the moment of simulated choice. The campaign was published in Russia in April 2015, with a separate campaign record noting a date of October 4, 2015, per Kampaniespoleczne Pl — a conflict that remains unresolved in publicly available documentation. The single media asset was digital in format, consistent with a web-based interactive execution. Co-agency VGNC, based in Ukraine, also received creative credit on the project, according to kampaniespoleczne.pl. Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 63 out of 100.
Red Pepper identified participation as the strategic engine of the campaign. Conventional anti-drug public service advertising in Russia and globally had long relied on shock imagery, celebrity endorsements, or cautionary narratives delivered from outside the user's own perspective. 'Try not to try' rejected that posture entirely. The campaign's insight is that passive observation of drug consequences produces desensitisation, while simulated decision-making produces something closer to genuine psychological exposure. By making the user the protagonist, Red Pepper forced a moment of self-revelation that static messaging cannot manufacture.
City Without Drugs Foundation brings particular institutional weight to this strategic direction. According to Ru Wikipedia and Kommersant Ru, the Foundation's documented public anti-drug activity dates to 1999 in Yekaterinburg, where the organisation ran outdoor billboard and social advertising programmes soliciting information about drug-selling locations. That sixteen-year arc from outdoor slogans to interactive digital simulation reflects a broader evolution in how Russian civil society organisations approach public health communication. In the digital public service space in Russia, campaigns like 'Try not to try' operated without the sustained budgets available to government-backed initiatives or the reach commanded by commercial platforms. Competitors for audience attention in this space include state-funded anti-narcotics messaging from Russia's Federal Drug Control Service, which historically favoured broadcast-format campaigns, and internationally distributed digital prevention programmes such as those coordinated through the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Against both, the ReDay interactive format represented a distinct creative and strategic position: intimate, first-person, and designed to produce discomfort through complicity rather than condemnation.
Red Pepper constructed the campaign around a single interactive website. The creative format depicts a young man's first encounter with drugs, rendered as a participatory experience in which the audience member advances the narrative through their own choices. The deliberate use of psychological tension — rather than graphic depiction — is the defining craft decision of the execution. Where many anti-drug campaigns in Russia and elsewhere have relied on visceral imagery of physical deterioration, 'Try not to try' locates its power in anticipation and agency: the moment before the decision, not the consequence after it.
According to hadock.es, ninety-three percent of participants in the interactive experience chose to try cocaine when placed inside the simulation. That figure, if accurate, functions as an involuntary demonstration of the campaign's own thesis — that curiosity and social context override rational caution in first-encounter situations. The statistic was not presented externally as a performance metric; it emerged from the experience itself, converting user behaviour into evidence for the campaign's argument. The website ReDay served as the sole distribution channel for the work. Production credits for the 'Try not to try' campaign are not fully publicly documented. Red Pepper is credited as the lead creative agency, with VGNC of Ukraine listed as co-agency, per kampaniespoleczne.pl. No director, creative director, or individual production credits are attributed in the publicly available archival record across clapboard.com, hadock.es, or kampaniespoleczne.pl. The campaign's restraint in medium — a single digital asset rather than a multi-platform rollout — reinforces the intentional focus on depth of engagement over breadth of reach, a deliberate trade-off for a foundation operating outside commercial advertising budgets in Russia.
No independently verified performance data measuring reach, conversion, or behavioural change for the 'Try not to try' campaign is publicly available, as confirmed by the archival records at clapboard.com. No verified award wins for this campaign are documented in the public records of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards.
The campaign does, however, generate a form of structural evidence through the interaction data referenced in its own execution. According to hadock.es, ninety-three percent of participants chose to try cocaine within the interactive scenario. Whether or not this figure derives from a controlled sample or a broader user population is not publicly clarified, but it serves as an internal proof of concept: the campaign successfully reproduced the psychological conditions it claimed to be diagnosing. The forty percent addiction-rate statistic surfaced within the experience, per hadock.es, adds a second layer of structural reinforcement — users who chose to try in the simulation were immediately confronted with the probabilistic consequence of that choice. From a structural effectiveness standpoint, the campaign's decision to compress insight, decision, and consequence into a single interactive moment represents a coherent and well-executed creative strategy. The absence of a multi-asset media plan limits its measurable reach, but the depth-over-breadth logic is intentional and consistent with the Foundation's resource constraints and creative ambitions. Clapboard scores the campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual originality tempered by limited documented distribution and the absence of verified third-party effectiveness data.
'Try not to try' is a 2015 digital public service campaign created by Red Pepper for City Without Drugs Foundation in Russia. It places users inside an interactive simulation of a first drug encounter, using psychological participation rather than graphic imagery to communicate the risk of addiction through the ReDay website.
Red Pepper, a Russian creative agency, led the campaign. Ukrainian agency VGNC is also credited as a co-agency on the project, according to kampaniespoleczne.pl. The campaign was produced for City Without Drugs Foundation and launched as a digital interactive experience in Russia in April 2015.
ReDay was the interactive website at the centre of the campaign. It presented users with a dramatised scenario depicting a young man's first encounter with cocaine, requiring participants to make the decision themselves. According to hadock.es, ninety-three percent of users chose to try cocaine within the simulation.
City Without Drugs Foundation's documented public anti-drug activity dates to 1999 in Yekaterinburg, according to ru.wikipedia.org and kommersant.ru. The Foundation ran outdoor billboard programmes soliciting information about drug dealers, making the 2015 digital campaign part of a sixteen-year evolution in its public communication strategy.
No verified award wins for 'Try not to try' are recorded in the public documentation of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, D&AD, The One Show, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards. Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 63 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual originality against limited documented reach.
The campaign rejected shock imagery and testimonial formats standard in Russian public service advertising. Red Pepper's approach used psychological participation — placing users in the decision moment itself. According to hadock.es, the campaign was described as having 'a very original way of communicating' the risk of first-time drug use.
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