PAINT | COLOR FOR THE COLORBLIND | 2016
Teaching color to people who'd never known it / Valspar "COLOR FOR THE COLORBLIND"
For the 300 million people worldwide with color blindness, a paint company found a way to "show" them color. Sounds impossible, right?
The problem
The paint industry is fiercely competitive, and Valspar needed a way to stand out from the bigger players.
The insight
Color blindness can't be cured. Normally, that's where a campaign idea would die. But FCB Chicago kept searching anyway, and found a company called EnChroma that had developed glasses that correct how people see color. The key shift was accepting "we can't cure it" as a given, and instead asking "how can we show them color?"
The idea
They invited people with color blindness into a room filled with colors they'd never seen before, and filmed their reactions, unscripted, the moment they put on the corrective glasses. The documentary footage captures real expressions: people seeing the color of their family members' eyes, or the blue of the sky, for the first time. The glasses were actually sold in stores, placed in the paint aisle. The brand's logo appears only minimally, so it doesn't look like a typical ad pushing a product.
What happened
Within a month of release, the campaign generated 800 million social media impressions, was shared more than 1,500 times, and was viewed 5.9 million times combined across platforms. The glasses sold out within a month. The campaign won a Cannes Lions Gold, a D&AD Yellow Pencil, and a The One Show Silver Pencil, among other awards.
Afterthought
What a paint company really wants to sell, in the end, is color itself. So there's something wonderfully bold about the leap to bring color, as deeply as possible, to the very people who know it least. And the order of things feels healthy, too: the technology wasn't invented for the ad; the ad found technology that already existed and built a bridge to it.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2016
