CM

Having a child is supposed to be the most wonderful moment of your life. It's all about love and happiness, or so they say. But that love often comes hand in hand with exhaustion, and that happiness with doubt. What's more, parents don't just feel worn out; they also feel guilty about feeling worn out. CM wanted to make room for all of those feelings, with a platform that gave parents a voice of their own.

Together with Friend Born Digital, we developed geenrozewolk.be (literally 'no pink cloud', the Dutch idiom for the idealised, effortless happiness new parents are expected to feel). The online platform gave young parents the chance to share, in a single sentence, what parenthood actually feels like for them. Anonymously, without judgement. Within just a few weeks, CM had collected over 1,100 messages from Flemish parents.

And those were painfully honest. In the end, 63% of parents were somewhat negative about early parenthood. In other words: two in three young parents don't experience parenthood as an effortless pink cloud. Something they had perhaps never said out loud before.

Together, the messages gave colour to a virtual cloud. Each submission received a colour — from dark grey to bright pink — based on its emotional charge. The result wasn't a vivid pink cloud symbolising perfect parenthood, but a grey-to-pink data visualisation of what parenthood in Flanders actually looks like. We built the cloud using an AI framework with three scientifically grounded layers.

The first layer used Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect. This model maps emotions on two axes: valence (negative to positive) and arousal (passive to active). Parental burn-out often doesn't sit in the most dramatic corner of that spectrum, but in a quieter zone: negative and low in energy. Empty. Tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Those are precisely the emotions that are hardest to recognise and most important to make visible.

The second layer used DANEW (Dutch Affective Norms for Words). In this validated Dutch word list, words are scored on valence, arousal and dominance. This allowed us to link emotional signals to recognisable emotional clusters.

The third layer added context through RobBERT. This Dutch-language model understands sentences as a whole, with an eye for nuance and ambivalence. Because a sentence about parenthood can be loving and sorrowful at the same time. Pink and grey at once. The model was extensively trained to capture exactly that.

Based on this analysis, each message received a position in the emotional spectrum and a corresponding colour. This way, we were able to visualise over a thousand personal messages carefully, efficiently, and meaningfully.

Anyone who shared a message also received a personalised referral to CM's care offering. Not as a diagnosis, but as an invitation to read further, start a conversation, or seek help.

The messages didn't stay online. They also became the raw material for a physical installation at the Stadsfeestzaal in Antwerp: a large cloud built from over a thousand slips of paper carrying real testimonies from Flemish parents.

Geen Roze Wolk isn't an activation that just any brand could claim. CM is Belgium's largest health insurance fund, with 4.5 million members and a local presence in every Flemish municipality. It stands alongside people every day at moments when their health becomes vulnerable, even when that vulnerability isn't visible or easy to talk about. It was precisely from that position that CM could name this taboo with genuine credibility.

Geen Roze Wolk gave young parents an accessible way to be honest about their feelings — all of them. At the same time, the activation gave CM a powerful platform around young parenthood and mental health.

This wasn't a conventional awareness campaign. It was a shared space where parents could recognise themselves and each other. A pink cloud, recoloured by the very people who are supposed to be sitting on it.