Missed Birthdays II - Campaign Against Living Miserably | Clapboard Ad Archive
Missed Birthdays II, the 2025 campaign from Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) in partnership with adam&eveDDB, picks up where its much-talked-about Westfield activation left off, shifting the UK’s approach to youth suicide prevention with a direct and emotive strategy grounded in lived experience. Supported by the Iceland Foods Charitable Foundation and executed across channels by ITV and the7stars, this second phase distills the magnitude of lost young lives into the true story of Evelyn, a 15-year-old whose home videos—full of laughter, birthdays, and ordinary family milestones—are reframed by her mother’s narration into a heartbreaking reminder of everything that future birthdays will never hold. It’s a creative choice that sits squarely in Clapboard’s FORMAT#7—Presenter Testimonial category, using the mother’s direct, unvarnished retelling to fuse personal grief with a universal call to action, and making the issue impossible to ignore. As statistics scroll and the film’s narrative reaches its abrupt and devastating end, the creative seamlessly reroutes viewers to the CALM C.A.R.E. Kit—an online toolkit for parents, carers, and trusted adults—delivering genuinely actionable advice and signposting a route to intervention for those previously unprepared or uncomfortable talking about suicide with the young people in their lives. In a crowded public interest landscape, CALM’s differentiation is marked by its focus on equipping adults with tools to act, not just raising general awareness, and by harnessing an omnichannel media plan that prioritises emotional cut-through via large-format cinema, TV, and platform-specific social assets. The campaign’s scale is matched by its intent: to correct a societal blind spot—just 15 percent of parents have ever addressed suicide directly with young people, despite the silent crisis outlined by the 6,929 youth deaths in the last decade—and to convert collective discomfort into grassroots engagement. Visually intimate and editorially bold, Missed Birthdays II resists abstraction and avoids glib messaging, instead leveraging the authority and empathy of personal testimony to open a window into private loss, thereby galvanising public conversation and action. The campaign earns 79/100 in Clapboard’s global creative archive. In a public service category often dominated by clinical, systemic, or awareness-led work, Missed Birthdays II demonstrates that credible advocacy for suicide prevention now relies on narrative intimacy, creative integration, and a real-world pathway to support.