“A girl got pregnant,” the video starts. “She was scared. Her parents thought her boyfriend was the father but it wasn’t his."
This might sound like an episode of a reality TV series, but it's part of a new ad campaign to make Jesus Christ more relatable to the masses by trying to bridge the gap with skeptics.
Cross-cultural agency Lerma/ led the creative for the "He Gets Us" campaign, which is funded by an anonymous group of billionaire donors from the faith-based nonprofit the Servant Foundation. The effort, budgeted at more than $10 million across 10 test markets in preparation for being taken nationwide, introduces the website HeGetsUs.com.
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The ads have “one singular focus,” Jon Lee, principal at Lerma/ said. That is “to invite people, particularly people who may be skeptical about Christianity, to rethink Jesus as an inspiring and human figure that we can learn a lot from regardless of what your beliefs are.”
The campaign features 15- and 30-second videos centered around key themes such as teen pregnancy, anxiety, and struggle that are meant to draw parallels between Jesus’ experience as told by the Christian faith and people's contemporary experience. Each video includes a black-and-white picture montage set to background piano music while a woman narrates.
The teen mom video shows her journey from finding out she’s pregnant all the way to the birth of her child. The narration includes simple and short sentences that coincide with each picture that is shown on screen and tells the story of Jesus’ birth.