Some do it with a snappy jingle, others with clever wordplay, still others with sexy models showing skin. Optica Halperin has a novel idea: encouraging people to perform one of the Ten Commandments.
Last month Optical Halperin – the low-cost optical chain with dozens of branches across the country – launched an only-in-Israel type of advertisement campaign: using one of the Ten Commandments to grab customer attention and sell some glasses.
The business did not choose the commandment one might have thought would have fit well into any eyeglass store’s advertising strategy: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
Imagine that campaign’s possibilities: “Swing over to Halperin’s to buy your glasses: that way you’ll see better and never bear false witness again.”
Instead, Optica Halperin, founded in 1988 by wrestler-turned-rabbi Rafael Halperin who passed his business onto his children after his death, chose the fifth commandment to make its sales pitch.
“Honor your father and your mother,” a woman with a chipper voice says in the 10-second ad that is running continuously on the radio. “When was the last time you invited your mother for a cup of coffee?”
“Honor your father and your mother,” runs a follow-up spot some 60 seconds apart. “When is the last time you had a heart-to-heart chat with your father?”
Another ad asks: “When is the last time that you called your parents just to say good morning?”
And where is the store’s plug in all this? At the very end, when the announcer says: “Presented by Optica Halperin.”
Another Israeli eyewear company, Carolina Lemke Berlin, uses supermodel Bar Rafaeli to pitch its glasses; Optica Halperin employs Moses.
ONE OF the biggest problems that advertisement executives face today is figuring out how to make their ads stand out.
We are bombarded by so many advertisements all the time, everywhere, that we just tune out most of them. This message, however, made me stop, listen and take note. It was short. It was different. I waited to hear who sponsored the commercial.
The advert also got me thinking about what, and whether, there is a connection between respecting one’s father and buying new lenses, or between honoring one’s mother and purchasing new frames.
I found the connection after reading an 11-year old article in a UK-based business magazine called Campaign.
“The advertising and marketing community believes its job is to tell people things that will persuade them to buy products – but those rational messaging campaigns are the least effective. The best campaigns make people feel things about a brand – emotions are more profitable than messages. People don’t want reasons to buy, they want emotional bonds.”
And this ad is doing just that, creating emotional bonds. You hear the ad and can’t help feel some emotion well up inside: either guilt that you have been remiss in this commandment, or self-satisfaction because you just called your folks. The emotion this advertisement elicits is very much in the ears or eyes of the beholder.
My default mode is to feel guilty… always. Maybe this is not the emotion that all brands would choose to be associated with – can you see Coke running an ad campaign trying to guilt the public into buying their soda? – but generating a feeling of guilt is an effective marketing strategy for folks like me.
And, apparently, there are more than just a few folks like me, as various ads here in the Jewish state play on guilt.
Take a public service spot that ran this week promoting Israeli agricultural products. It featured a farmer near the Lebanon border reminding the public that during both the First and Second Lebanon wars, as well as when the Katusyhas were falling in between, dedicated chicken farmers in the north continued – “with pride and love” – to provide the nation with fresh eggs.
Who could buy an imported egg after hearing such an ad?
UNTIL THE OPTICA Halperin commercial started to air, I didn’t consciously think every day about how I was measuring up on the honor-your-father-and-mother front. And I was okay with that.
But now I confront the issue every time I hear this blurb on the radio – which is a lot. When the ad asks when was the last time I called my dad just to say “hello” or had a real heart-to-heart conversation with him, I question myself about whether I’m doing either of those things enough. Should I be calling more? Could our conversations be longer and deeper?
I remember as a child going to shul with my dad, and always feeling a bit uneasy those three times during the year when The Decalogue was read. Not because I had anything against the Ten Commandments, God forbid, but because when the congregation would rise and the Torah reader would reach the fifth commandment, my father would jab me hard in the shoulder and give me a knowing glance, as if to say, “Do you hear that, son? Pay attention.”
My unease turned into glee, however, when I had children of my own. Then, when they went to synagogue with me and heard this part of the Torah portion, I would jab them in their shoulders and give them the same “shape up” look.
But that jab and look had a different impact on my kids than it did on me. While this instilled in me a sense of perpetual guilt, in my kids it just reinforced their feeling that they have this commandment covered.
When I asked one of my sons the other day whether he had seen or heard this ever-present Optica Halperin ad, and what he thought of it, he replied that he heard it and it made him feel good in the knowledge that he was doing the right thing.
He is also someone who has no problem buying cheaper imported eggs from Italy and Portugal. Which all increases my guilt for not implanting more guilt in my children.