Heetch Puts Psychologists in the Back Seat to Start a Mental Health Conversation
Heetch's "First Conversation" campaign, created with BETC Paris in partnership with Foundation Falret and activated across France from 28 to 31 March 2024, placed trained psychologists and mental health ambassadors inside Heetch ride-sharing cars to open direct, stigma-free mental health dialogue with young passengers.
The campaign addresses a specific and documented tension in France. In 2024, one in five young people suffer from depressive disorders, according to Heetch's own editorial framing of the initiative. Yet mental health remains deeply taboo among this demographic, with popular culture continuing to reinforce the idea that seeking help signals weakness rather than self-awareness. Heetch's user base made the brand uniquely positioned to act: seventy per cent of its users are under 30, according to Renaud Berthe, Chief Marketing Officer at Heetch. These are precisely the young people — many from disadvantaged neighbourhoods across France — who already confide in drivers during late-night rides home from parties or difficult commutes to work.
The strategic logic is disarmingly simple. If young people will not go to therapists, Heetch and BETC Paris reasoned, the answer is to bring therapists to them. For four days, Foundation Falret psychologists and mental health ambassadors rode as Heetch drivers across the French market. Passengers who opened up received what the campaign calls a "first conversation" — an accessible, non-clinical entry point into mental health support — along with guidance on available resources. Heetch simultaneously committed to extending the initiative beyond the activation period through active-listening training for its broader driver community, as reported by lareclame.fr. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100, reflecting its structural originality and meaningful integration of brand utility with social purpose.
Heetch identified its strategic opportunity not through conventional market research but through its own passengers' public behaviour. Drivers for the platform had long noted that young riders — particularly those from the Parisian suburbs and other underserved urban communities in France — used the car journey as a confessional space. Karim, a Heetch driver since 2019, described the dynamic precisely: passengers speak openly, he observed, partly because the driver's gaze is fixed on the road, removing the social discomfort of direct eye contact. Social media amplified this observation into a recognisable cultural pattern, with users posting tweets describing their Heetch driver as more useful than their therapist.
The mental health context in France makes this insight structurally significant. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has documented persistent gaps in youth mental health support across its member states, including France, noting that stigma and access barriers remain among the primary reasons young people do not seek professional help, according to the OECD. Against that backdrop, Heetch's positioning — as a brand already embedded in young people's daily lives and trusted by them as a non-judgemental presence — gave the campaign a credibility that a conventional awareness advertisement could not manufacture.
In the competitive ride-hailing market in France, where operators such as Uber and Bolt compete primarily on price, speed, and driver availability, Heetch has consistently pursued a differentiated strategy built on cultural proximity to young urban audiences. BETC Paris established this positioning as early as the 2021 "Greetings From La Banlieue" campaign, which championed Parisian suburb communities against stigmatised media representations, as documented by lareclame.fr. "First Conversation" extends that same logic: rather than competing on functional attributes, Heetch stakes a claim on the emotional and social territory its drivers already occupy in young people's lives.
"First Conversation" achieves something technically unusual in experiential advertising: the product mechanic and the creative idea are identical. There is no campaign layer placed over the service experience — the experience itself is the campaign. BETC Paris structured the activation so that every element of the ride-sharing encounter, the car, the driver, the journey's natural intimacy, functions as both medium and message.
Olivier Aumard, Executive Creative Director at BETC Paris, stated publicly that the campaign was designed to address young people's mental health as a concrete service rather than a theoretical discussion, as cited on betc.com. That distinction shaped every production decision. Psychologists and Foundation Falret ambassadors were not actors performing a scenario; they were credentialled practitioners placed in an environment already proven to encourage disclosure. The brief, as articulated by CMO Renaud Berthe, demanded that the intervention feel earned rather than intrusive — an extension of something that was already happening organically.
The creative team at BETC Paris responsible for the campaign included Stéphane Xiberras as Chief Creative Officer and Olivier Aumard as Executive Creative Director, with copywriting credited to Guillaume Denis and Sébastien Duhaud, as documented across betc.com and lareclame.fr. On the client side, Heetch brand managers Renaud Berthe, Hector Gruyer, and Benjamin Sousa oversaw the initiative, supported by BETC account leadership comprising Mathieu Laugier, Aude Devaux, and Lara Lefort. The four-day window — 28 to 31 March 2024 — was deliberately concentrated, creating a defined activation with the narrative compactness that awards juries and media coverage both reward. La Réclame covered the campaign under the headline "Heetch met des psys dans ses voitures," describing it as a concrete effort to encourage young people in France to speak about mental health, as reported by lareclame.fr.
"First Conversation" generated a documented awards record that validates both its creative ambition and its strategic coherence. The campaign was shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2024 in three distinct categories: Outdoor, specifically the Interactive Experiences subcategory; Brand Experience and Activation in the Brand-Owned Experiences subcategory; and Brand Experience and Activation in the Corporate Purpose and Social Responsibility subcategory, as confirmed by Clapboard's editorial research. The breadth of those shortlistings across outdoor, experiential, and purpose categories reflects the campaign's structural refusal to sit neatly within a single discipline.
More substantively, "First Conversation" won a Gold award at Effie France 2024 in the Pure Player Digitaux category, credited jointly to Heetch, BETC Paris, and Havas Edge France, as recorded by effie.fr. The Effie recognition is particularly meaningful because the award methodology evaluates demonstrated marketing effectiveness rather than creative ambition alone. A Gold Effie in the French market, where competition among purpose-driven campaigns is acute, indicates that the campaign moved measurable needles for the Heetch brand beyond the activation window itself.
No additional verified performance metrics — passenger engagement rates, driver training uptake figures, or brand-tracking shifts — are publicly available for "First Conversation" at this time. What the structural evidence does confirm is that a four-day, geographically contained activation in France generated three Cannes Lions shortlistings and a Gold Effie, a return on creative investment that most brand campaigns with far larger production budgets do not achieve. The Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100 reflects that efficiency: high strategic clarity, strong cultural fit, and measurable industry recognition, weighted against the limited scale of the initial activation and the absence of published reach or outcome data.
Heetch's First Conversation campaign placed real psychologists and Foundation Falret mental health ambassadors inside Heetch ride-sharing cars across France from 28 to 31 March 2024. Created by BETC Paris, the initiative gave young passengers an accessible, stigma-free entry point into mental health conversation during their everyday rides.
Heetch partnered with Foundation Falret to bring clinical credibility to the activation. Foundation Falret specialises in mental health support in France, and its psychologists and ambassadors provided the professional expertise needed to ensure that conversations initiated during rides were genuinely supportive rather than performative.
Heetch's First Conversation received three Cannes Lions 2024 shortlistings across Outdoor Interactive Experiences, Brand Experience and Activation Brand-Owned Experiences, and Brand Experience and Activation Corporate Purpose and Social Responsibility categories. The campaign also won Gold at Effie France 2024 in the Pure Player Digitaux category, as recorded by effie.fr.
BETC Paris built the strategy on an existing behavioural insight: young Heetch passengers in France already confided in drivers during rides. Executive Creative Director Olivier Aumard led the creative team in translating that organic dynamic into a structured intervention, replacing ordinary drivers with Foundation Falret psychologists for a concentrated four-day activation.
Stéphane Xiberras served as Chief Creative Officer and Olivier Aumard as Executive Creative Director at BETC Paris on First Conversation. Copywriters Guillaume Denis and Sébastien Duhaud contributed to the campaign, with account leadership provided by Mathieu Laugier, Aude Devaux, and Lara Lefort, as documented by betc.com and lareclame.fr.
Heetch delivered mental health access as a live service rather than a media message. Instead of running awareness advertising, the brand embedded Foundation Falret psychologists directly inside its ride-sharing cars, meeting young people in France in a space where they already felt comfortable speaking — the back seat of a moving vehicle.
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