2026 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Founded in 1989 as a crisis line, Kids Help Phone (KHP) is now Canada’s only national, free, 24/7 e-mental health service for youth. It is funded largely through donations.

KHP needed to increase donations from adults, but there was a challenge.

Adults underestimated youth mental health needs, which reduced motivation to donate. This was a perception problem.

Defining Help addressed this using millions of data points from anonymized and aggregated youth conversations with KHP. The data uncovered how young people describe their feelings and revealed a clear gap between what youth experience and what adults understand. This data became the foundation of the strategy and inspired creative.

The agency transformed these real youth experiences into 1,028 unique definitions of “help.” Every execution focused on one lived experience, turning abstract mental health into something specific and human.

By grounding the idea in real youth language, the campaign made invisible struggles visible and impossible to ignore.

Data also informed how the work stayed relevant, ensuring placements and messages reflected what youth were experiencing across different contexts and moments. For example, if anxiety increased in a region, that community saw more anxiety-related definitions. This brought local youth experiences closer to home for adults.

By making help visible in real and relevant ways, the campaign increased understanding and motivation to support a service that young people rely on everyday – leading to a significant increase in donations.

Many adults still believe KHP is only for emergencies, reducing motivation to donate towards a service they don’t think is relevant to the youth around them.

When it comes to mental health support, many parents think 'not my kid'. Adults overlook that every young person can benefit from the help KHP provides and their role in sustaining the service through donations that keep it free and accessible for all youth across the country.

The objective is to increase donations from adults by reframing KHP as necessary everyday mental health support for all youth and making clear that sustaining KHP’s service depends on adult funding.

Help is ignored when it doesn’t feel relevant.

Defining Help transforms millions of data points from anonymized and aggregated youth conversations into 1,028 definitions of help – using real feelings from youth to define what “help” in Kids Help Phone means.

Defining Help disrupts assumptions that youth are “fine,” by revealing the emotional weight young people carry and reframing help as something needed, relevant, and worth supporting.

Mental health conversation data is highly sensitive. As the only organization with youth mental health conversations at this scale, KHP has a duty to use this data carefully.

Care was taken to protect youth privacy through three layers of de-identification using AI tools before analysis. Human-in-the-loop validation ensured they accurately captured what youth were expressing.

The data revealed patterns in where and where certain emotions were most frequently expressed across Canada. Thousands of real youth feelings were organized into DAY and NIGHT moments, segmented by time of day, geography, and emotion.

Credits

Kids Help Phone (KHP)
McCann
Jordan Doucette, Chief Creative Officer
AJ Jones, Chief Strategy Officer
Athina Lalljee, Creative Director
Pedro Izzo, Creative Director, Design
Ethan MacDonald, Senior Copywriter
Tina Peng, Art Director
Emily MacLaurin-King, VP Group Account Director
Farida Shagara, Account Supervisor
Josh Hansen, SVP Strategy
Sabrina Lau, Senior Strategist
Jana Tuck, Senior Producer
Jason Kan, Video Editor
Genevieve Mallette, French Copywriter/Translator
Jon Dick, Music Research
Angela Fufeng, Cultural Advisor
Sauvage
Director: Ernest Desumbila
Producer: Eva Laffitte
Post Producer: Amanda Serradell & Yukio Montilla
VFX Artists: Arnau Espàrrech, Emanuel Espinoza, Genis Ferrer, Jordi Arques & Roger Oller
3D Generalists: Alejandro Gazquez, Albert Montero, Carlos Yau, Gerard Rodriguez, Ricard Castilla
& Víctor Pérez

Compositing Artists
Adrià Draper, Aurelio Pozas, Daniel Lores, Diogo Santos, Guillem Maresma,
Joan Palacios, Marc Costa & Silvia Torrella

2D & Motion Design
Arantxa Gil& Bartomeu Plomer

Creative Project Manager
Teseo Cuadreny

Alfredo Films
Holly Rowden, Partner / Executive Producer
Alex Henry, Partner / Executive Producer
Line Producer, Nick Gervais
Cinematographer, Kris Belchevski
Production Designer, Daria Savic

Grayson Music
Music Director, Lowell Sostomi
Music Supervisor, Warren Bray
Sound Designer & Engineer, Eric Hulme
Exec Producer, Kelly McCluskey
Cover Composer, Andrew Austin
Vocals:
Mike Nelson, Erica Wilson, Kayla Diamond, Andrew Austin

Nimiopere
Julie Axell, Founder / Executive Producer
Raj Ramnauth, Founder / Editor
Chris Chang, Editor

The Vanity
Katie Methot, Executive Producer
Andrew Exworth, Senior Colourist

Craft
James Bolter, Senior Video Editor
Nathan Baldassero, Editor
Chrystian Danucalov, Motion Graphics Editor
James Balutan, Motion Graphics Designer
Dino Cuzzolino, Audio Engineer
Nilesh Jadhav, Production Artist
Anil Dsilva, Production Artist
Rohan Ghorpade, Production Artist
Salunkhe, HTML5 Programme