Huggies® is a partner of perinatal depression charity, PANDAS Foundation. 

With postnatal depression affecting more than 1 in 10 women within a year of giving birth, too many parents quietly grapple with mental health challenges, and are facing extended waiting times when they do seek help. Partnering with Huggies and PANDAS, we wanted to change this.

Our brief was to get parents and carers who aren’t aware of PANDAS and/or perinatal depression to feel reassured that there is a place to turn to by communicating real-life experiences and PANDAS’ service in an empathic and supportive way.

Our mission was to shine a light on PANDAS’ invaluable free support network, empowering parents to identify early signs of perinatal depression while acknowledging the complex nature of this issue.

Working closely with Huggies and PANDAS, we created an organic social-first campaign; a suite of short-form videos called Walk & Talk Diaries. Our videos featured authentic conversations and experiences of real mums, aiming to resonate with every parent. Our approach prioritised authenticity, with workshops involving real parents to identify key themes related to perinatal mental illness. 

Given the sensitive nature of the topic, we approached the campaign with empathy, choosing an unconventional setting: local parks. Real-life, unscripted conversations unfolded as mums walked, providing a natural and relatable backdrop. The short-form content, which was tailored for Instagram and TikTok, aimed to strike a balance between feeling native and heroing Huggies as a brand partner. 

With a small production budget, we had to ensure our video executions could flex across both social platforms and utilised native-style overlays and subtitles, along with subtly placed logos to achieve this.

By foregoing traditional constraints, we succeeded in delivering a genuine and impactful campaign, fostering understanding and support among parents and caregivers affected by perinatal mental illness.

With zero media spend, in the first four weeks of posting we organically reached over 51k people, with one Instagram Reel having over 11k organic views. On TikTok, our best performing piece of content had a 9.9% engagement rate and an average watch time of 17.9s. 

“So far, our partnership with Huggies has allowed PANDAS to offer 13% more support to parents. We’re excited to further increase awareness of PANDAS and the support we offer to many more parents, carers and their networks, so that we can help more people with knowledge, advice and support who may be struggling with perinatal mental illness.”

Annie Belasco, Head of Charity at PANDAS