BRIEF 

Should’ve gone to Specsavers is part of UK culture.  A simple yet effective sight gag that is the brand’s opportunity to be playful in what is typically a serious category.  For the past 20 years, Should’ve has helped keep Specsavers as the number one optician in the UK and consistently delivers brand likeability and top of mind awareness. 

Specsavers is known for putting innovation and creativity at the very heart of everything they do, so when we were challenged to come up with a media execution to drive talkability and buzz around the launch of our new Should’ve campaign, we were excited, but also a little daunted.  

Our brief was to make sure we were unmissable, using existing platforms in new and creative ways to keep Should’ve fresh and relevant, whilst laddering up to our overall objectives of increasing brand likeability and top of mind awareness. 

STRATEGY 

As always, we had a hilarious new TV ad to launch but the challenge was that it was rooted in travel and slightly less universal than some of our other ads.  The risk of leaning too far into travel is that we would be doubling our competitor set and going up against both opticians and the travel sector with their huge budgets.   

We took the decision to stay away from travel and rely on the classic simplicity of Should’ve.  Two years ago, we saw huge success with our OOH special builds for Should’ve 2.0 - we'd left ourselves with some big shoes to fill.  When you’ve already delivered one of the most talked about and surprising OOH moments in the last five years, how do you top it? 

Should’ves are simple. They need to land the joke straight away, and so we needed something that was laugh out loud funny and yet completely realistic and relatable.  We wanted to stay close to OOH but take the gag out of the poster and into the real world. 

We brainstormed long and hard about what Specsavers’ next realistic blunder could be and drew inspiration from real-life parking fails and the “can’t park there, mate” videos on social media.  It was time to break out of the billboard and boost our creativity to the max with our very own vehicle.

Why fake it when you can make it?!  We wanted to make this stunt happen in real life but we needed to create something that would be hyper-realistic. Our idea needed to be something that could happen to our customers in everyday life...enter the bollard! 

Surprisingly, parking on a rising bollard is as rare as having short-sightedness... it’s incredibly common. Even the police have had their vehicles skewered by rising bollards! 

EXECUTION 

Specsavers are renowned for their sense of adventure and fun, so they were up for this from the very start. They had challenged us to be experimentative and push new limits, and this hit the nail on the head.  They were as excited as we were to make this dream a reality, so we got to work immediately. 

Working alongside Specsavers Creative, MG OMD, Talon and Ann Squared Events, Grand Visual scoped out locations across the country. It was important to find locations that would or could naturally have bollards, so we chose Castle Street in Edinburgh and Liverpool ONE. Ensuring the initial stunt (Edinburgh) was believable, we opted for a staggered approach with Liverpool ONE to follow in succession. 

With our locations picked, it was time to get to work! Sadly, we couldn’t park a van on a real bollard. Safety first, right? Instead, and we feel like a magician revealing the truth behind his tricks here, we created bespoke bollards to match the location and carefully set them up under the cover of darkness in the dead of the night. One of our bespoke bollards was secured onto the underside of the van, giving the illusion that someone had really parked on it. 

As dawn rose on an ordinary Spring morning in Edinburgh, pedestrians going about their usual business couldn’t believe their eyes. A van had parked on a rising bollard. A Specsavers van too... with a warning sign literally feet away. Oh, the irony! 

As soon as the van was raised into the air, pedestrians instantly started snapping and sharing the blunder on social media. To make matters worse, a ticket officer spotted the van and slapped a hefty fine on it. 

Side note: Seeing the irony of the stunt, the ticket officer was 100% real and just had to get in on the joke. He was even given a fake Specsavers ticket to use! We digress. 

As the van’s hazards flickered away, onlookers watched in amazement; this was just too good. Before we knew it, all eyes were on Specsavers (not just those that were there, but all over the country) with images of our van driver’s mistake plastered online. 

“It's really funny that out of all the vans, it was a f*cking Specsavers van haha,” one post said. “Caption writes itself,” another added. Specsavers’ own tagline was even used against them, “The driver really should have gone to Specsavers.” How mortifying. 

Before Specsavers knew it, the van was picked up by the national press and was even discussed on the ITV show “This Morning.” They genuinely thought it was a hilarious real-life accident. You could say the wool was pulled over their eyes... 

Specsavers’ social mentions were blowing up and the brand was a great British laughingstock... or were they? 

In true Wagatha Christie style (google Coleen Rooney’s note and you’ll see what we mean), Specsavers issued a statement. It was tough to keep it to ourselves and not make any comments, especially when the van was EVERYWHERE so, after a few days of silence, we finally came clean.  It was us all along. 

RESULTS (Confidential) 

We smashed it! We saw brand likeability jump three percentage points in the period immediately after the campaign and TOMA increase by one percentage point.  Although these might seem like marginal gains, we are already coming from a high base and exceeded target on both counts.  

Not only did we achieve our core business objectives, but the campaign went viral, and we succeeded in getting (almost!) the whole country to believe our stunt was actually real.  The execution was picked up by nine national press titles, at least 14 regional titles, 5 trade titles, a whole host of radio stations and even featured on ITV’s This Morning.  

In addition, you know you’ve knocked it out the park when other advertisers want in on your joke!  The AA parked up next to us and posted on social media ‘we heard you were in a spot of bother and had to come and see for ourselves…don’t worry, it’s OK when you’re with the AA’. 

As a result of being shared across passersby’s social channels, the stunt garnered over 6 million social media views and almost 1 million likes, comments and shares.  I think we can safely say we achieved our objective of increasing brand likeability and driving talkability, in fact, I think we can say people were shouting from the rooftops. 

The moral of the story: Get your eyes tested and go to Specsavers! 

"We were truly delighted with the success of the Ad Van, it surpassed our expectations, delivering against the brief to be disruptive and attention grabbing.  It was great to see the British public and media getting involved generating huge amounts of earned attention for the stunt" 

Ian Maybank, Head of Connections Planning, Media, and Insights, Specsavers