Is your love creeping? MSD helps young people find out in new campaign via CLEMENGER UNLTD

There’s a difference between a cosy night in every now and then, to consistently isolating you from friends and family. Between caring that you eat well, to expecting a say in your body shape. Between wanting to know when you’ll be home, to needing to know your location at all times.

‘Love Creep’, coined by Clemenger UnLtd, describes how love can turn into a pattern of control. Lovecreep.nz helps young people experience it; validating those who feel controlled, waking users up to their emotional abuse (knowingly or not), and giving family and friends a way to broach the subject.

Says Zaffa Christian from the Ministry of Social Development: “Love is filled with intense feelings that make control hard to spot and easy to deny. Lovecreep.nz helps young people explore what it looks, sounds and feels like, so they understand why the ‘love’ they’re experiencing doesn’t feel right. This is a tool that seeks to prevent behaviours becoming ingrained and potentially life threatening in relationships now and in the future.”

The experience uses real life examples (Love Bites) to educate people on how to spot controlling behaviours from isolation to surveillance, gaslighting, and more. It also enables them to create their own patterns of control based on what they may have experienced, seen, or used.

Says Brigid Alkema of Clemenger UnLtd: “Controlling behaviour is difficult to understand if you haven’t experienced it. We wanted to push past observing someone being controlled, and instead elicit what it actually feels like. A simulation of what it’s like to go through Love Creep. Making you feel confused, small and worthless. The challenge was to make the individual Love Bites seem like they had loving intention.”

Says Matt Von Trott, Assembly: “Lovecreep.nz was an opportunity to engage a young audience in a bold way. The challenge was assembling videos on-the-fly to empower users to edit their own experiences on their phones or desktop. This required generating adaptive live-streaming playlists, while trying to keep the experience simple and interesting to play with.”

Client: Ministry of Social Development
Creative Agency: Clemenger UnLtd
Lead Production Co: Assembly
Film Production Co: Scoundrel
Director: Jamie Lawrence
Sound Design: Beatworms
Photography: Loupe Agency
Photographer: Steve Boniface
Retouching: Notion London Retouching
Media: OMD Wellington
Social Management: FUSE
Research Company: Verian