We invited people with hearing difficulties to join a focus group for a company that supplies…glasses and we asked them: how would you convince a grandchild who doesn’t want to wear glasses? We collected their answers and then they discovered their grandchildren were actually there, listening to them. Children gave them their same advice, focused this time not on glasses but on hearing aids. Grandparents reactions were emotional and moving. The experiment became a video. The video was hosted on bastaprovarci.it with the call to action to take a hearing test. On the website we open the discussion about hearing loss collecting personal stories about it, then we launched a contest, in which thousands of children faced little tests to convince their grandparents to do the same, by taking a hearing test.

Our video was the result of a social experiment: we invited people with hearing difficulties to join a focus group for a company that supplies glasses. We filmed their emotional reactions when they discovered the real reason why they were there and they found their grandchildren. The video was aired on TV and in cinemas in October 2015. Since April 2015 it was hosted online on the website bastaprovarci.it, where we collected personal stories of people with hearing difficulties and their relatives. On the same website from October 2015 we launched a contest involving all Italian children, who had to face little tests to convince their grandparents to do the same, by taking a hearing check.

Our operation had a strong human impact, involving emotionally Italian people and helping Amplifon make a first step for an important cultural shift, overtaking the stigma still related to the topic of hearing loss, opening the dialogue about it. The results were excellent: brand awareness reached 95%; commercial effectiveness of the campaign: +40% (versus baseline) and (comparison with the same period last year) hearing tests on new client: +700%; hearing aid trial: +500%.