“If I’m advertising an eye drop, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to be showing eyes somewhere in the ad,” Rob Baiocco, chief creative officer at the Bam Connection said about the agency’s new Fear No Light campaign for Rohto’s Dual Light Relief. “That’s how everybody ends up showing the same thing over and over again, all looking the same. So how do you break out of that in a different visual way?”
The Fear No Light spot which began appearing in August on social media including Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, has plenty of closeups of eyes but instead of turning to pharmaceutical ad cliches of symptom-free actors running through sunny fields, the spots “break out” visually with a humorously dark aesthetic that turns to horror film tropes. The spot starts with someone fleeing in the dark from an unseen threat, while a shaky handheld camera adds a Blair Witch Project feel. The danger to one’s eyes, the spot’s voiceover tells us, is light: “sunlight, screen light, digital light, natural light… Light, light, light!” and then, the solution is presented. Eye drops that offer protection against both sunlight and digital light.
When Jim Thornton, director of sales, category leader, eyecare/skin care at the Mentholatum Company, was presented with the concept for the spot, he was unreservedly enthusiastic. “ My reaction at the time was ‘this is kickass,’” he shared.
“Visually it grabs you. It kind of sucks you in. You don’t initially know what you’re going to find at the end. It takes you on that journey and it builds the momentum and then it hits you with, ‘Hey, you’ve got a problem. We got something to fix it,’” he continues. “This is building a story and building a case as it addresses issues that the consumer may be unaware of.”
While Thornton avoids the term “challenger brand” at least somewhat when describing Rohto (“we’re not a challenger brand in the sense of a challenger brand that was developed in somebody’s garage, put it out on social media, and it went viral and took off”) both he and Baiocco agree it is a “smaller share” brand and they embrace the challenges and opportunities of that market position.
“If you’re going to spend less as a smaller player, you’ve got to make a bigger noise as we always know,” Baiocco said. “Doing the same exact thing as your competition while spending less money is the definition of failure in advertising.”
He goes on to explain that the core differentiating theme of the spot, the dangers of light, was inspired by the product itself.
“They handed us a product that has a uniqueness to it. Usually we deal with slivers of unique and we’re trying to make them into two-by-fours, but here we had something very unique,” he explained. “We looked around and did our research into word clouds. Nobody was talking about light. But with all its harmful effects, the light is a bad thing. And that’s how we got the aha moment that when it comes to your eyes, you should actually fear the light.”
While the ads don’t spend much time or many words explaining the science behind Rohto’s Dual Light drops, Thornton and Baiocco don’t see that as a concern. Baiocco points to plans for other outreach on platforms including TikTok and Twitch as opportunities to go into more depth about the product while Thornton sees the value of the current spots as a powerful introduction.
“The purpose of this campaign is really to draw the consumer in,” Thornton explained. “It’s got that kind of shock value and then we have all types of ways to communicate the benefits of Dual Light Relief and how it works through our websites and other platforms. This was really just to grab them and get them to say, ‘I want to know more.’”
