When marketing misses the mark: mental health, risk, and responsibility

Content warning: mental health and suicide.

In recent days, Ant & Dec shared a promotional video for their new podcast. The opening visual was quickly criticised online because, at first glance, it could be interpreted as resembling suicide imagery. Many people described the image as distressing or triggering, particularly for those affected by suicide or mental health trauma. Following the backlash, the video was removed and an apology was issued, stating that there was no intention to cause offence or harm.

In the age of social media, it pays to think ahead and plan for risk before you post. That doesn’t mean doing a full risk assessment every time you share an office update. But when content relies on visuals, wordplay, or symbolism, especially content designed to grab attention quickly, having a clear idea of why you’re posting, who your audience is, and what context people bring with them can make a significant difference.

There is also a large amount of free guidance available from mental health charities and lived-experience organisations. Using it is not about being overly cautious or watering down creativity. It is about reducing the chance that someone encounters harm while casually scrolling.

I mention this because none of us are immune from getting it wrong. The situation above is a useful example of how quickly a well-intentioned piece of content can land very differently when viewed through lived experience, trauma, or emotional fatigue. The fix is rarely complex. It often comes down to building a lightweight pre-post check into your workflow, particularly for visuals, wordplay, and audio.

Why this matters beyond one advert

In an age of social media, where content moves quickly and impact isn’t always predictable, mental health is still too often treated as something we talk about after harm has occurred.

We see this pattern most clearly when a well-known figure dies by suicide. We mourn, we reflect, we say “we need to do better”, and rightly so. But those moments are rarely connected back to the everyday decisions that shape the cultural environment people are living in long before a crisis point is reached.

To be clear: individual tragedies cannot and should not be directly compared to marketing missteps. But they do exist within the same ecosystem. An ecosystem where mental health is frequently acknowledged in hindsight rather than designed for in advance. Where we react to loss, instead of embedding care, caution, and responsibility into everyday communication.

This is why moments like this matter. Not because one advert caused harm on its own, but because they highlight a wider cultural issue: mental health is still treated as an abstract concern rather than a practical design consideration.

Guidance already exists, and it’s accessible

This is not an area without advice or expectations. Mental health charities and advertising regulators have long published guidance on how imagery, language, and symbolism can impact people experiencing distress.

Across this guidance, there is consistent agreement on a few core principles:

• Intent does not cancel impact

• Ambiguous or symbolic imagery carries higher risk

• Large audiences increase duty of care

• Prevention happens before publishing, not after backlash

In other words, brands are not being asked to predict every possible response. They are being asked to consider foreseeable harm and to make that consideration part of normal creative planning.

How the podcast could have been marketed instead

The issue with the podcast promotion was never the concept. A relaxed, behind-the-scenes show about friendship and television is not inherently risky. The risk came from the execution, specifically, the choice of a visual metaphor that introduced ambiguity in a context where ambiguity predictably gets punished.

On fast-moving platforms, people don’t pause to decode intent. They scroll, they skim, and they fill gaps with whatever their brain recognises first—especially late at night, especially when they’re tired, and especially when the imagery overlaps with sensitive cultural associations. In that environment, a creative idea doesn’t need to be “wrong” to cause harm; it only needs to be plausibly misread.

A safer approach would have communicated the same tone: casual, humorous, friendly, without leaving room for interpretation.

Make the visual do one job, clearly

When a phrase has multiple meanings, pairing it with imagery that can be misread creates unnecessary exposure. The simplest fix is to choose visuals that can’t plausibly be mistaken for something else.

That might mean keeping it grounded and literal: an informal photo of the presenters together; studio shots; walking, sitting, standing, anything visually stable and unmistakable. Or it could mean removing the “scene” entirely and using a clean title card with the audio layered over it.

The principle is straightforward: if an image can reasonably be interpreted as something else, it isn’t doing its job.

Lead with context before people invent their own

Even with safer imagery, context should arrive immediately. Viewers do not wait for an explanation that comes ten seconds later, and they will not reliably read a caption beneath the video.

A clear opening line, spoken or on-screen, stating exactly what the content is (“New podcast episode: behind-the-scenes chat about…”) prevents misinterpretation before it starts. This isn’t about over-explaining; it’s about giving the audience an anchor so they don’t create one for you.

Choose clarity over cleverness when the audience is broad

Metaphor can be effective, but it works best when the context is controlled and the symbolism is unambiguous. On public platforms, the audience includes vulnerable people by default. That isn’t a niche consideration, it’s a basic condition of publishing at scale.

When the stakes are mental health, clarity should win. Not because humour or creativity is inappropriate, but because the cost of being misunderstood is disproportionately high.

Use humour without relying on visual shock

Light-hearted promotion doesn’t require risky symbolism. If the goal is “warm, funny, familiar,” there are safer ways to communicate that: outtakes, banter, behind-the-scenes moments, studio chaos, and human details that signal tone without provoking distress.

You can still be playful, you just don’t need to be ambiguous to do it.

Build a quick “sense check” into the workflow

This is where the systems piece matters. A short pause, ideally by someone not involved in the creative, often catches the problem early. Three to four questions are usually enough:

• Could this reasonably be read as something else?

• Would this land differently for someone scrolling late at night?

• If a mental health charity saw this, would they raise concerns?

• Is the joke still funny if someone is already distressed?

If the answer to any of these is “possibly,” that’s not a moral failure. It’s a practical signal: tweak the creative, keep the intent, remove the risk.

This is about systems, not blame

None of this requires outrage or hindsight. The same podcast could have been marketed effectively, and safely, with minor creative changes. That’s the point: this wasn’t inevitable.

Accessibility is not only captions and alt text. It includes emotional safety, context, and recognising that audiences bring their own histories with them when they engage with content. When brands build mental-health-aware checks into their workflows, they don’t lose impact; they reduce harm, avoid crisis management, and build trust.

Designing for the most vulnerable viewer rarely makes content worse. More often, it makes it clearer and better for everyone.