Leg 'm neer
A social awareness campaign about phone use — designed to create a moment of recognition, not to lecture.
Type
Social awareness campaign
Our role
Creative concept, design, digital experience
Status
Active
The problem
Constant phone use is reshaping how people connect, rest and think. Most people sense this. Research confirms it. But awareness campaigns on this topic tend to follow a familiar, ineffective pattern: cite the data, suggest a solution, ask people to change.
The data does not make people change. The call to action does not make people change. What creates a moment of actual pause is something that reflects a feeling people already have but have not quite articulated.
Who it is for
Anyone who uses a phone — which is most people. The campaign is not aimed at a demographic or a psychographic segment. It is aimed at a feeling: the low-level awareness that something about your relationship with your phone is not quite right.
The challenge is that this feeling is universal but rarely talked about directly. The campaign tries to give it a voice without being preachy about it.
Do not explain the problem. Create the feeling.
Leg 'm neer (put it down) is built around the idea that the most effective behaviour change does not happen when someone tells you to change — it happens when you genuinely feel the weight of something yourself.
The digital experience was designed to feel deliberately different from the platforms it is talking about. No infinite scroll. No notifications. No engagement mechanics. Quiet, slow, confrontational in a gentle way.
There is no product, no subscription, no conversion goal. The campaign asks nothing. It just creates a moment — and leaves the rest to the person experiencing it.
The process.
Starting from a real feeling, not a brief
The campaign started from a genuine observation: most people sense that their phone use is affecting them — but they do not do anything about it. The brief was not 'make people use their phones less'. It was 'make people pause and actually feel that.'
Deciding not to lecture
Every behaviour change campaign wants to inform. We made the opposite choice: the campaign would not explain the problem, reference research or suggest a solution. It would just create a moment of recognition and leave the rest to the person experiencing it.
Designing against the grain
The digital experience was built to feel deliberately different from what phones usually feel like. Slow. Quiet. Not reactive. If the campaign was about the pace of scrolling, the medium had to feel different from scrolling — which meant resisting every instinct to optimise for engagement.
Writing for honesty, not impact
The copy was written and rewritten many times. The rule: no hyperbole, no statistics, no instructions. Every line had to be something a person might think but not say out loud — familiar enough to land, honest enough to mean something.
Keeping the campaign small and focused
We resisted the temptation to expand the campaign into more channels, more content, more features. The digital experience is intentionally contained. A single, coherent thing — not a platform, not a movement, just a moment.
What this taught us.
Restraint is a creative decision
Every digital convention pushed us toward more: more interactivity, more animation, more content. Saying no to all of that required active effort — but the stripped-back result was far more effective.
Not having a conversion goal is liberating
When the campaign does not need to drive sign-ups, downloads or sales, the design becomes much cleaner. Every element exists to serve the experience, not to serve a metric.
The medium is part of the message
A campaign about phone use has to feel different from the things people usually do on their phones. The form and the content have to match — or the whole thing falls apart.
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