Responses by Jon Morgan and Bertie Rapkin, associate creative directors, Specsavers.
Background: Health brand Specsavers is famous for its eyecare, but not everyone is aware that its experts can look after your hearing, too. The purpose of this campaign is to position Specsavers as hearing experts while making the point that everyone’s hearing is different and people can lose different sounds. Hearing loss can start at quite a young age, so the campaign needed to feel fresh and have broad appeal.
Design thinking: We thought this was a great opportunity to celebrate all the ordinary sounds that surround us every day—sounds that are actually pretty amazing when you think about it. We spent a lot of time chatting about all the little sounds that you take for granted and came up with a way to describe them onomatopoeically. Once we’d written a couple, we knew we were onto something.
Challenges: The biggest challenge with the billboards and the press was to find ordinary, everyday sounds that are not only pleasant but could be represented with onomatopoeia. Not only that, but our new words and phrases had to be simple enough to be understood by the general public in a few seconds. There were some sounds we wanted to use, but we just couldn’t represent them well enough using words!
Favorite details: Hearing aid ads tend to involve old couples walking along windswept beaches, but we wanted to do something that avoided these cliches and stood out in the category. Hopefully we’ve managed to create something modern and disruptive.
New lessons: This may not be something new, but the project was a good reminder of the importance of space, simplicity and single-mindedness. Less is almost always more.
Specific project demands: One of the main challenges was to create a campaign that felt premium but also had a witty tone of voice. Those two things aren’t always easy to combine, but hopefully we’ve come somewhere near it!
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