Animated Series: Drunken Rewind

Young adult men aged 18 to 30 are one of the hardest audiences to reach with a public health message. They're skeptical of anything that feels like a PSA, they don't watch traditional media, and they're extremely good at tuning out content that wasn't made for them.

Our client, the Foundation for a Healthier West Orange, needed to reduce binge drinking and drunk driving in exactly this population, but the conventional public health playbook wasn't going to work on this audience.

We started with research, focused on two questions: what message would actually move this audience, and what format would reach them where they already spent time online. The research pointed in a clear direction. This group was deeply engaged with Adult Swim and South Park, animation built around irreverent humor, self-aware writing, and characters who felt like peers rather than authority figures.

That insight became the creative concept. I developed the idea for Drunken Rewind, an animated series built specifically around the aesthetic and sensibility this audience already loved, and wrote the first two episodes. Rather than delivering health messages didactically, the series embedded harm reduction content into humor that the audience would actually seek out and share. A new episode was released monthly over three years, each one carrying between three and six evidence-based messages about drinking.

The results demonstrated genuine behavior change, not just reach. The campaign achieved a 73% average viewer retention rate across its one to three minute YouTube episodes, exceptional for any content and nearly unheard of for public health. By year three, 63% of the target audience was aware of Drunken Rewind. Among viewers who had seen the campaign, 90% found the content relatable, 90% felt it provided useful information, and 87% said it made them more aware of their own drinking habits. From baseline to year two, the share of respondents who perceived daily drinking as risky nearly doubled, from 31% to 60%. Viewers aware of the campaign also showed significantly higher intentions to drink less often and in smaller amounts than those who hadn't seen it.