Seeing Isn't Believing In Specsavers Landmark Glaucoma Ads

Glaucoma is an eye disease that gradually affects your field of vision by creating blind spots. But perhaps the most unsettling part, is the way it sneaks up on you. “Those affected can go years without noticing, as the brain compensates by filling in the gaps and masking the damage,” explains creative, Anders Hellström. “With this in mind, we wanted to raise awareness by creating a campaign that not only educates people about this condition, but also makes it ridiculously easy to understand.”

From there, Anders says the idea evolved into making specific everyday objects disappear in plain sight. This was launched by hijacking TV4’s Swede-famous commercial break vignettes as well as billboards ‘affected by’ glaucoma, making famous landmarks disappear.

To stay true to the main symptom of objects disappearing in plain sight, creative, Urban Wirdheim says they built a digital replica that was based on an AR/AI algorithm. “It was trained on live-streaming specific landmarks at specific locations and making them disappear when people stopped to look or passed by,” Urban tells me. It was a process filled with plenty of trial and error in order to get it right.

“Our main focus was to educate about glaucoma in a clear, clever way that wasn’t scary; just eye-opening. We worked closely with experts within Specsavers to ensure that our assets were true to the medical condition, as well as interesting enough to be effective,” Urban explains.

“The funny thing is that we didn’t know it would work properly before actually installing it into a billboard,” says Urban. “Guess our excitement when we turned it on and our first landmark went *poof!*”

Urban says that the idea was always centred around cleverly integrating blind spots into different types of ads, “so that became the red thread throughout the campaign – things disappearing that should really be there.” This resulted in truly effective ads where people would see something they intuitively knew to be strange, and therefore got curious enough to stop and look, whatever the platform.

“At first, many thought that the billboards were providing information about the actual landmark, like info screens for tourists, but when the landmark went missing as they stopped to look, people got curious,” Anders tells me.

Project lead, Magnus Tengzelius says the collaboration between Nord DDB and the brand was truly open, helping both parties to form a strong team. “Specsavers are phenomenal at understanding and valuing creative work, which isn’t strange, because they’ve always been good at doing that,” he explains.

Beyond raising awareness, the team extended an extensive PR effort in the run up to World Glaucoma Day. “Opticians and say doctors representing Specsavers spoke about the importance of regular eye exams to detect and prevent conditions like glaucoma before it’s too late,” says Anders.

While it’s still early days, the feedback has been incredibly positive, and bookings for eye health examinations have exceeded the team's expectations.