Y&R Singapore sheds light on 'change blindness' in Brand's campaign

Entitled 'Brand's alertness experiment', the campaign is designed to demonstrate a lack of alertness among people as they go about their daily lives and how Brand's Essence of Chicken helps improve alertness when taken on a daily basis. It utilises radio with amusing spots playing on the 'alertness' message, together with OOH featuring short exercises that people can try out for themselves to test their own levels of alertness.

The task was to help consumers recognise the benefits of and encouraging them to drink Brand's Essence of Chicken daily instead of as an occasional pick-me-up. Y&R and Cerebos opted to focus on 'Change blindness', a phenomenon wherein people fail to notice an obvious change happening right in front of them. 

Students of the School of Social Sciences at SMU were approached to devise ideas for experiments that could be conducted among ordinary people going about their daily lives in Singapore. Furthermore, it would show 'Change blindness' in an effective and amusing way, while subsequently emphasising that we are not as alert as we think we are.

Out of 29 ideas, a photography idea was selected to kick off the campaign - a passerby is asked by a crew member posing as a tourist to take a photo of him and his girlfriend. After the photo is taken, the 'tourist' asks to see the photo and asks the passerby if he would mind taking another photo. As this conversation occurs, the crew member posing as the girlfriend is swapped for someone different which the passerby fails to notice.

The scenarios, filmed with hidden cameras and using real people, will air as TVCs and be uploaded to the campaign website where users will be asked to spot other changes in the film for the chance to win prizes. 

A Facebook page was set up which took the Singaporean expression of having a 'blur' moment, encouraging people to share their own experiences of a lack of alertness online.

"Brand's has always been a science-driven product, and our communication challenge is to present the science interestingly and engagingly to consumers. We decided to innovate and not just engage consumers in the communication but in the science itself by making the man on the street the subject in an experiment on the lack of alertness," noted Hari Ramanathan, regional planner for Y&R.

"The results were consistent with past studies - about 70 per cent of the people did not notice large changes in their environment. Digital is an integral part of the campaign and Facebook was a good platform to engage people in what interests them and then relate it back to the brand's efforts," he added.

Credits:

Chief creative officer  Marcus Rebeschini
Chief client officer  Sangram Sengupta
Art director  Lydia Lim
Copywriter  Adam Miranda
Account manager  Pooja Singh
Regional planner  Hari Ramanathan
Director  Eric Khoo
Production house  Zhao Wei films
Production producer  Fong Cheng Tan
Post production  Frameworks
Sound  AMX