The sleaziest...hearing aid ads you'll ever see.
(click ads) Apparently in New Zealand, people start losing their hearing younger? Because the Kiwi heavy metal bands play louder, longer shows that blow out their eardrums? I can't think of any other logical reason why one would include a naked hussy and a tattooed, tasseled tranny (not a tranny, according to a comment by the ad agency) in hearing aid print ads. Well, except for...why not? No such sordidness found on the Widex website. (images via). Previous unsexy products sold with sex: Rachachuros meat seasoning, Heinz soups, Method floor cleaner, and Lorgan's used furniture.
posted by copyranter @ 9:45 AM
11 Comments:
If your going with those visuals, a more intelligible headline for both ads would have been:
PRICK UP YOUR EARS with WIDEX hearing aids
(with apologies to 'The Biography of Joe Orton')
For naughty seniors I uess.
All fun and no target audience.
Hi, well we are the agency which put this campaign together so I thought I'd answer a couple of your points. This is one of four ads, and probably the raunchiest. Two of the others have men on them so as you can see we have our sexist chips equally on each shoulder.
These ads were written with only one purpose, and that was to get people buying Widex hearing aids. We wanted to demonstrate that a hearing aid in itself doesn't make you unattractive. We used shots that in the fashion world would be considered pretty tame to demonstrate how little a hearing aid actually affects your appearance and that you don't have to be old to be hard of hearing.
The ads are all running as billboards in order to make the debate public and inescapable. Lots of people who need hearing aids drive their families mad by refusing to get one. We wanted to get these conversations out in the open.
Will it work? Well, the ads are only just up but already we have had younger people who wear hearing aids saying the ads make them feel better about themselves. And for maybe the first time a non-scam campaign for hearing aids is getting noticed.
Obviously we would prefer comments like 'bold' and 'category breaking' rather than 'gratuitous'; but we can live with that if it works for our client and we get people wearing hearing aids rather than shouting 'what did you say?' every second sentence.
Oh, and that's a lady not a tranny in the other shot.
Hey Anon, do the hearing aids come with your 6-paragraph explanation?
TM makes sense...it has to be the fashion community who are deaf. Anom's comments make sense.
This campaign adds a perverse new twist to 'See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil'.
In other words it was created by a bunch of funky cube monkeys.
The porn boomers can't hear the videos anymore because of past concert going.
The aim of the ads cannot really be, as is claimed, to point out that wearing hearing aids doesn't affect one's appearance. We cannot see the frickin' ears of these girls at all. They could be packing humongous 1980s beige-coloured plastic aids on both ears, and we wouldn't be able to tell. The aim is simply to be provocative in order to give profile to a product, and near-naked teen girls serves that aim - they should have the common honesty to say that and let people judge whether it's justified. (Well, we've judged.)
I have always been very doubtful as to whether people who appear in hearing aid adverts are actually deaf - and seeing as you can't see the hearing aid(s) of these two people, I would like Widex to prove to me that these two women are actually deaf and are wearing hearing aids under their hair. Now that's not too hard, is it?
1) They are not deaf, we could not find any deaf models.
2) They are both wearing hearing aids as are the guys in the other two ads.
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