Need your help with pre smartphone youth photos for new Rage Against the Screens campaign

[JustineMumsnet]

Hi all,
We’re looking for real photos from Mumsnetters’ gloriously pre-smartphone youths for a new Mumsnet ad campaign about getting kids off screens and back into real life (part of our wider Rage Against the Screen campaign).

We’re calling it Your Mum Thinks You Should Live a Little and the basic message to teens is:

1. Your mum was actually quite cool once
2. There’s more to life than staring at a screen and your mum wants you to go out and live it

It’s a celebration of the slightly chaotic, occasionally misspent, entirely offline lives we were living before social media arrived.
Think:

• blurry disposable-camera nights out
• giant trousers and tiny tops
• first festivals
• dodgy fringes
• snogging behind the bike sheds
• actual hobbies
• friendship groups that existed in 3D
• rave/goth/indie/skater/grunge pics
• terrible fashion choices
• chaotic holidays
• badly decorated teenage bedrooms
• anything that screams “1990s”

If you’d like to contribute, upload your photos here.
If we’d keen to use any as part of the campaign, we’ll of course contact you directly first.

We’ve shared a few examples below to get everyone started. Let us know what you think?
Thanks,
Justine

If this is aimed at teens, are you not worried they may take the last photo as being encouraged to photograph each other naked?

It just looks a wee bit out of place.

Yes, can we lose the naked teenage girls?

It doesn't sit right in this context, does it?

And could be seen as encouragement.

And of course the difference between now and 'way back when', is that whoever took the photo won't have uploaded it to social media.

A real risk today that wasn't around back then.

The photo of naked teenage girls is not cool.

Surely the whole conception of this idea goes against everything that has ever been known about teen psychology (also agree about the photo, even odder).

I’m not sure how those photos would persuade anyone to put their phone down? They don’t look any different to the photos you see on any smartphone 🤷🏼‍♀️

Anything your mum did is inherently not cool from the get-go, so this feels pointless. Uploading photos online to encourage your kids to get offline feels oxymoronic. Uploading naked photos of teen girls to make any point at all is just plain moronic.

I'm surprised the naked teenage girl photo made it through the MN photo filter.

Seriously?
You have a picture of 3 naked teens there?

What on earth? Why did you choose that picture? Is that an example of what you're wanting us to upload?

Yes, I remember someone complaining her yorkshire puddings didn't make it through 😁

Fair challenge - and to be clear, the intention absolutely isn’t to encourage kids to share nude photos.

The image makes more sense alongside the strapline it was designed for: “Your mum didn’t send nudes. She was nude.” The broader point of the campaign is that previous generations experienced freedom, rebellion, friendships, boredom, messiness and real life offline, rather than through phones and social media.
But point taken that, separated from the line and context, the image can land differently.

The overall aim of the campaign is very much the opposite: to encourage kids to spend less of their lives online and more of it actually living. And it's meant to be a little bit provocative.

LOVE this idea. Will dig out some photos.

Even with the strapline…..what on earth were you thinking??? Who is behind wanting to use photos of naked girls/young women? Not provocative just very weird.

Do you think an invitation to picture their mother naked is likely to appeal to a teen audience?

Ahh ok, thanks for the explanation.

However, even with the strapline I can't convince myself it's not inappropriate for a campaign aimed at kids/teenagers.

Doesn’t matter how you tag it, the nudes are out of keeping.

It was brilliant until the naked children - then it got totally weird!! I don’t even get the strap line behind that, I don’t think that is necessary whatsoever.

I am actually shocked at the nude pic, and I can't believe you actually think you can explain it away.

And they want kids to listen to mum about having less screen time, yet most kids would stop listening to their parents the minute they started talking about bringing naked themselves. Imagine saying to your teen ‘I didn’t send nudes, I was nude’……instant shut down from your average teen. It’s honestly clueless and someone needs sacking for coming up with such inappropriate shite, but that also completely misreads teenagers.

Yeah, I'm struggling to think of a single thing a teenager would find more horrifying than a picture of their mother naked.

It’s a Ryan McGinley print, he was obsessed with taking photos of naked teens. He was older.

Are you going to be paying people for the usage in your ad campaign?

Oh gosh I'd never heard of Ryan McGinley so I googled him and stumbled across a naked teen orgy in a tree! 😳

The image makes more sense alongside the strapline it was designed for: “Your mum didn’t send nudes. She was nude.”

what the hell. What the actual hell. This sounds downright creepy. What ad agency came up with that? It’s appalling.

I tried to reverse google photo search to double check if it was one of his and it told me it wasn’t allowed to search as it breached legal guidelines…..

If an ad agency came up with any of this, MNHQ should ask for their money back. Even if we put aside the nude pictures for a minute, we’re talking about teenagers here, I'm sorry but teens find their mums embarrassing and uncool and they don’t want to do what they’re told, this campaign seems perfectly tailored to put them right off.