Public sector communication has a familiar problem. The services being promoted are often the ones that matter most to the people who are hardest to reach, and the conventions of official advertising are rarely the ones that hold a young person's attention for long enough to explain what is on offer.
Youth Trailblazer, a support programme run by Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, sits squarely in that gap. It exists to help young people aged 18 to 21 who are not currently in education, employment or training, offering employment opportunities, work experience and career support. Reaching that audience, and being trusted by it, was the task CNS Media took on.
The agency's response was to build the campaign around social platforms from the outset rather than adapting existing public sector messaging for them. The work ran on TikTok and Snapchat, supported by Google Search and Spotify, and used creator-led content designed to look like something a young person would choose to watch rather than an advert interrupting the thing they were already watching.
An audience that traditional advertising misses
Young people who are out of education and out of work are a group that public sector organisations consistently struggle to engage. Formal messaging and conventional advertising can feel distant or irrelevant, and the more official the communication looks, the less likely it is to land with the people it is intended to help.
CNS Media's aim was to change how the programme was perceived, positioning Youth Trailblazer as an approachable and trusted source of opportunities rather than another institutional scheme trying to speak to a younger audience. That meant treating the tone of the campaign as seriously as its content, and accepting that information about employment, work experience and career support could be delivered in a way that felt natural inside the social environments young people already spend time in.
There was a wider question behind the brief too, which was whether creator-led social could genuinely improve how public sector organisations communicate with younger and harder-to-reach audiences. The campaign gave the agency an opportunity to test that in a real setting.
Built for the platform, rather than adapted to it
The creative was structured around four clear messages: finding employment or work experience, connecting young people with local employers, building confidence and career skills, and providing practical support and guidance.
Creator-led content inspired by user generated video was developed specifically for TikTok and Snapchat, running alongside branded animated assets. Working with both gave the team room to test different creative approaches and to understand which of them the audience actually responded to.
That testing became the spine of the campaign. CNS Media tested different creators, hooks, video lengths, messaging and calls to action across both platforms, then used live performance data to decide where investment should go. Rather than treating the media plan as fixed once the campaign launched, the team optimised continually towards the creative and the channels generating the strongest engagement, allowing audience behaviour to shape the work as it progressed.
What the campaign showed
The agency's own reading of the results is that authenticity matters as much in public sector communication as it does for consumer brands. Younger audiences do not respond differently simply because the subject is an important service, and the way a message is delivered still has to suit the environment it appears in.
Creator-led content consistently emerged as the strongest creative approach across the campaign, which reinforced the value of letting performance data influence creative decisions while activity is still live rather than relying on assumptions made before launch.
CNS Media is an independent full-service marketing agency founded in Chesterfield in 2006, with offices in Manchester and Birmingham and a team of more than 40 people working across media, outdoor, digital, SEO, social and creative. Its in-house creative production team, Fork The Waffle, was set up to bring creative and media closer together, and Youth Trailblazer is an example of that structure at work, with the creative idea, platform strategy and media optimisation developed alongside one another from the start.
The agency sees the wider opportunity as taking what it learned here into more public sector campaigns, particularly where the subject matter is important but has traditionally been communicated in formal or institutional language.
The winner of Purpose-Led or Social Impact Campaign of the Year at the Social Media Marketing Awards will be announced at the awards ceremony on 8 October in London