A new campaign from Kids Help Phone wants to show adults how their perception of what a child is feeling rarely captures the full picture.

Called “Fine,” the new work – created with agency partner McCann Canada – focuses on how many adults miss the severity of what the kids in their life are going through. One out of every two youth today are struggling with mental health alone, according to research conducted by KHP, and while many of those kids will tell the adults in their lives that they are “fine,” the reality is that they are anything but.

“There is a disconnect between how young people are feeling about their mental health and what adults understood about the state of their mental health,” explains Athina Lalljee, ACD at McCann Toronto. “A recent study showed that while kids are really struggling, their parents often thought things weren’t as bad as the kids said they were. It boiled down to the insight that kids don’t feel comfortable expressing their true feelings to adults in their lives.”

And that’s not necessarily because they feel it unsafe to do so, either, she adds. “It’s just hard to talk about these issues.”

Armed with that insight, the challenge was clear, according to Lalljee: McCann had to “get adults to understand what things are really like for young people today, even if they say things are fine.”

The campaign is an extension of the “Feel Out Loud” platform that the non-profit launched late last year, which came attached to a $300 million fundraising goal as it seeks to expand its services to every corner of the country by 2024. While that initial wave of advertising sought to encourage kids to speak out about how they were feeling, including by tapping into KHP’s support and resources, this new campaign is more strategically aimed at the adults in their lives and is designed as much to raise awareness about the plight of young people as it is to raise funds for the organization that supports them.

“The audience has shifted to look toward caring adults – those who have kids and those who don’t – to encourage them to see KHP as, more-or-less, an essential service,” explains Josh Stein, CCO at McCann. He points to the service’s usage – in 2021, Canadian kids used KHP services 4.1 million times – and says “this was a moment for us to stop adults in their tracks a little bit.”

“We had an opportunity to tell a really simple, honest story,” he adds. “One that tells adults to pay attention, but also, that they need KHP to be here for these kids when they need it.”

The new campaign launched earlier this month and will remain in market through to April 16. It is running on digital, TV, OOH and social.