Instagram has been losing traction with young adults . While they value the cultural role of the brand in their lives, consuming content was becoming the norm on a platform built for creating it. The often too perfect, overly polished content can intimidate, not inspire. Expression is overcome by excuses to not do it.

We created Anyway - a new brand identity and mission to depressurise creative progress, and enable young people to take more creative chances in a world full of reasons to never try.

We took a famous piece of the brand UX - the Instagram create button - and made this the centerpiece of a visual metaphor for taking a creative chance and putting ideas out into the world.

Globally recognised creative icons were captured pushing the button itself, showing young adults that creative progress starts with the simple act of self-expression on Instagram.

Instagram wants to remove the barriers encountered on a creative journey. To depressurise self-expression. We wanted to spotlight the role that the platform plays in levelling the playing field by building tools that allow anybody to share their creative ideas with the world, through the simple tap of a button.

This would be supercharged by making it resonate to varied creative pursuits. A multi-talent approach was built to show icons from major cultural categories - film, music, art, fashion - taking their own creative chance.

A deeper layer of meaning was added by launching these moments on high impact media around the world in major cultural capitals and talent’s home cities, creating local on-the-ground impact through a global campaign system.

Button Press launched with six cultural icons who use Instagram in their own creative journey - Tyler The Creator, Rosalia, Nadia Lee Cohen, Clint Ogbenna, Cole Bennett and Slawn - on high impact static and motion OOH across culturally attuned neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Miami, London and Barcelona.

This idea was designed to use OOH as a way to scale through social feeds. Talent created new content - IRL alongside their Button Press site, sharing tributes through Instagram and creating a new behaviour where fans and followers participated by sharing their own captures of the media.

The campaign execution has become a new visual franchise for Instagram, with brand UI at the heart. A storytelling construct which spotlights an evolving breadth of global icons and rising stars who are accelerating their creative journey through the simple act of pushing the button.

The Anyway campaign has significantly reshaped how online audiences perceive Instagram, leading to noticeable reductions in associations such as fear of judgement, performance pressure, and creative strain.

Over 78% of young adults associated Instagram with creativity following the campaign, with a 147% increase in positive sentiment around the brand during the launch period for Button Press and the Anyway campaign.