Danish youth hold a sad European record in binge drinking. A staggering 40% of Danish 15-16-year-olds (compared to an average of 13% in Europe) report having been intoxicated within the last 30 days, which among other things means that every year more than 30.000 youngsters visit the emergency room due to alcohol consumption. A sad fact for an organization like The Danish Cancer Society, as alcohol increases the risk of cancer and more than 200 other diseases.

That’s why the Danish Cancer Society, together with TrygFonden, have set out on a journey to get the Danish youth to drink less.

We wanted to catch the attention of a notoriously unimpressed audience who don’t care about ads, and make them reflect on their unhealthy drinking habits – specifically in relation to their “FOMO”. This led to the hypothetical question: “What if you missed the one night your friends will remember forever?”

The question led to the story of a guy who drinks too much and misses the most important night of his friends’ lives; something he will regret forever. Throughout the story, his friends keep revisiting that one magical night, gradually unveiling new aspects of what actually happened, who they met and their new inside jokes. Eventually the man goes crazy, and the film ends with the payoff “Drink less, Miss less” emphasizing that even though the film might be exaggerated, the message is clear: An unhealthy drinking culture has longer-lasting effects than a hangover.

Danish youth hold a sad European record in binge-drinking. A staggering 40% of Danish 15-16-year-olds (compared to 13% in Europe) report having been intoxicated within the last 30 days. A sad fact for an organization like The Danish Cancer Society, as alcohol increases the risk of cancer and more than 200 other diseases. To get young people to care about their alcohol intake and the appertaining health implications, we needed to create a strong and singular campaign that would get their attention.

To do so, we decided to talk to them about something deeply terrifying to youths: FOMO (“fear of missing out”). In fact, research found that more than half of 18-24-year-olds have experienced missing out on something they wanted to be a part of because of excessive alcohol consumption. To tell the story, we created a short film of huge entertainment value that stood out and deeply engaged audiences.

It’s extremely hard to communicate to a young target group that drinking is uncool.

You can’t be an “adult” talking about health or side effects (that will be translated to “bla bla…)

So we tried with humor.

Going into the project I didn’t know it would eventually end up as a short film length project.

I just wrote a script that I thought could be fun, and as we were going over the scenes with the agency to select the best ones and narrow it down, we basically ended up "choosing" all of the scenes. We were fortunate enough that the client was onboard for us to shoot this short fiction format...

Now we just had to find a way to produce 5 x the material we originally thought we would.

With tight planning and the willpower from a small talented crew and cast, we made FOMO FOREVER.

By reaching +90% of the Danish youth within the first week, the reach of our film surpassed all expectation and outperformed all KPI’s.

The campaign sparked nationwide conversations about the downsides of binge-drinking across social media. The target audience engagement was tremendous, and an extraordinarily positive sentiment could be monitored on social media with +21.000 likes, shares & comments. Within the first couple of weeks, the campaign piled together more than 3 million video views across social media, and on YouTube the average video view (measured across all exposures) lasted for +90 seconds(!), meaning that 45% of the Danish youth have seen the entire campaign voluntarily. FOMO Forever was featured in national and international press.

Selected social media reactions:

“@Peter will never be drunk again after watching that!”

“This film SCREAMS my name! No more FOMOOOO!”

“OMG what an epic ad. I watched every second of it!”