The Heart Foundation pulls ‘Heartless Words’ TVCs following negative reception from viewers
The Heart Foundation has responded to feedback on its latest public awareness campaign “Heartless Words”, developed by Host/Havas Sydney and has announced that the campaign advertisements will no longer run in their current form across media and social media channels.
Says Chris Leptos, chairman, Heart Foundation Board: “To all the people who have been offended by our campaign, we apologise, and to all those who provided their feedback, we have listened.
“We tried to take a bold and emotive approach. We misjudged it. We had never intended to further hurt people already struggling with heart disease, or to further pain loved ones who have lost people to heart disease. It is clear, however, that many people feel we did both of those things.
“To all of those people, we say a heartfelt ‘Sorry’. Helping to relieve the suffering caused by heart disease is at the centre of everything we do. This campaign was devised with the best of intentions – to save lives – but it has had an unforeseen impact.”
The campaign used an emotional appeal to deliver the message that when we neglect our own hearts, we risk breaking the hearts of those who love us. The campaign was designed to convince people to have a Heart Health Check.
Heart disease is largely preventable. Most heart attacks are caused by high blood pressure, high cholesterol and lifestyle factors. It is estimated that if all Australians at risk had a Medicare-funded Heart Health Check over the next five years, up to 76,500 hearts attacks and strokes, and up to 9,100 deaths, could be prevented.
A new Heart Foundation campaign will be coming soon.
17 Comments
Cudos to the Heart Foundation for finally bowing to the criticism and admitting how wrong and insensitive the campaign is. Hope the brand hasn’t been damaged too much. I feel for those at the foundation who have worked so hard over the years to build a brand and to raise money for campaigns like this. What a waste.
I hope Host/Havas have taken some responsibility too.
What a waste of money.
Made the wrong choice of agency and of campaign and will now pay for it I expect
Not for running it, but for pulling it. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t argue with it when my daughter called and asked if I’d seen my doctor.
Continuous dodgy stuff happening over at the Heart Foundation. I hear the ‘serial killer’ idea they did a few months back was pinched from another agencies pitch work.
Serial Killer was created by Newscorp staff at a Newscorp conference on Hamilton Island in Sept 2018 after Chris Taylor from Heart Foundation briefed the 200-odd Newscorp audience.
I know, because I was there (as a guest).
Gutless.
The campaign was working its ass off. Very disappointing.
I thought this was incredibly compelling.
No other campaign in recent memory has been as ill thought out than this. I hear Hughesy and Kate absolutely rip this apart on prime radio too. It achieved in getting the nation talking but for all the wrong reasons.
The fact the CMO’s boss has had to step in to clean the mess up is proof of how damaging this campaign has been to the brand.
For anyone who keeps defending this, wake up! You clearly worked on this and have no heart.
There will always be a few armchair critics to criticise high profile advertisements particularly if they are done by non sexy agencies. The net effect is clients become too scared to do high profile advertising and then decide advertising doesn’t work. Everyone loses. Whether I like it or not should be a matter of stunning indifference to the world. In this case the critics who have bullied this off the air clearly don’t love the business.
What a shame that a confronting, challenging, and bold idea was pulled because we, as a nation, still reside in mediocre thinking stoked by the fires of political correctness and fear. That’s fear of anything that is not conservative, retrograde or ‘safe’. We truly deserve what we get.
If you think insulting and belittling those who have lost loved ones to heart disease or are suffering from the disease is the only way to be bold, confronting and challenging then you my friend are 100% part of the problem.
You’re wrong. Aussies don’t want ‘safe’ or ‘conservative’ work. They just don’t want stupid, lazy and work that shocks for the sake of it. Many nations would have reacted the same.
abc creative tip: There are hundreds of other ways to be bold, confronting and challenging without been insensitive to millions.
NO we as a nation have a long-held and worthy tradition of not inflicting unnecessary pain on those that are mourning lost ones. This offended and therefore failed, the mediocre thinking is with an industry that mistakenly thinks that you insight action in people with shock and awe. Read the research it has never and most likely never will work. If you need somewhere to start, try decades of “confronting, challenging, and bold” antismoking campaigns all of which separated the Government from millions of dollars and never impacted on smoking rates. We have the data we just need to give a shit enough to read it.
https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2013/nov/19/charity-shock-tactics-do-they-work
Never let a story get in the way of a good truth…
https://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/whoever-made-that-ad-never-had-to-tell-a-child-daddy-died-last-night-20190602-p51tpd.html
In the distant past, I worked for a brilliant ECD who had an expression for this sort of work. He called it ‘fuck in a church’ advertising. As in, it’s really easy to elicit a shock response from people – but that doesn’t make it right, or good.
There are some valid points above. Yes, the work got noticed, yes it got a reaction. But at what cost? Honestly, to hurt a bunch of people (and yeah, there’ll be those who say it’s worth the cost, and those who say harden the fuck up – both easily said when it’s not at your expense) it’s not on. The best article that I read about the whole sorry saga was written by an Age journalist who’d lost her husband to a sudden heart attack caused by undiagnosed heart disease. She had to explain to her young kids that dad died last night. And whilst she saw merit in the campaign – particularly that diagnosis is quick and easy and largely free, she’d be mortified if her kids saw the work. Because years down the line, they’re all understandably still torn up by the event. I think someone attached a link to the article above.
In short, yes, it’s our job to get the message out there and get the advertising noticed. But we have to do that by being clever, not just by being shocking.
The buck stops with the CMO.
No ifs no buts.
If the first (albeit plagiarised) campaign was working in OZ, why the change of tack??
Where’s the IDEA that holds these two campaigns together, other than the client’s logo?
No one gets the importance of ‘campaigns’ in your country, do they?