Brands that know how to crash the youth-culture party don’t just get noticed – they own the room. Hollister milking 90s nostalgia? Genius. ELF turning TikTok into their personal playground? Perfect. Aerie saying ‘screw it’ to airbrushing? Chef’s kiss.
But what if you’re not selling lip gloss or jeans? What if your gig is telling teenagers not to get scammed into sending nudes? That’s less “pop a gloss and strike a pose” and more ‘awkward parent energy.’ It’s hard to play the cool kid and the school nurse.
That’s the minefield Childline tiptoes through every day.
Sex is already the conversation teens don’t want to have with adults. Add in sextortion – creepy scammers tricking teens into sharing nudes and then blackmailing them – and suddenly you’ve got shame, fear, taboo, and, heartbreakingly, teens who’ve taken their own
lives.
So how do you cut through? Three rules: show up where they already hang out, speak their language, and make it worth their time.
Cue ‘Leng or Liar’, Childline’s recent social success. Picture a quick-and-quirky ten-minute game show – think Blind Date meets Catfish – cooked up by creative agency House of Oddities with influencers WhyDee and Kay the Jeweller (of the Charvas). The lads get 20
questions to grill three ‘girls’ based on bios and pics – except some aren’t girls at all, they’re AI-generated decoys.
It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s chaotic – exactly how teens consume content. The serious message sneaks in under the radar: don’t believe everything with a pretty profile picture, and watch for the red flags before you send that nude.
Feedback from young audiences so far proves that they’re willing to engage with long-form content from brands if it’s entertaining and has authenticity and relatability at its core.
But there is an additional secret sauce: bravery. It takes guts to hand over the Childline brand to creators and trust them not to wreck it. Kudos to the Childline team: do they all know what ‘Leng’ means? Absolutely not. Do they need to? Absolutely not. When you do put
your trust in smart and savvy creative agencies you get campaigns that feel alive, not corporate PowerPoints with emojis stapled on.
‘Leng or Liar’ isn’t just a win. It’s a masterclass in how to speak teen without sounding like you just discovered TikTok last week. And it could go on to save lives. That’s not just peng.
It’s leng.
