BBR Saatchi & Saatchi: Bekol hacks Spotify to get young people to look after their hearing

Spotify has only just arrived in Israel. This was a dream opportunity for Bekol, Israel’s organisation for the hard of hearing, to speak directly to millennials.

Most younger people use earphones to listen to music at increasingly higher volumes. The average age for getting a hearing aid is dropping. In fact, medical authorities have reported that people as young as 40 are now finding they need a hearing aid.

BBR Saatchi & Saatchi knew that Israeli’s younger audience would automatically search for Spotify on Google, so the agency bought Google Adwords and promoted a site with a very similar domain name to Spotify: spotify.org.il.

Young people who fell into our trap were taken to the agency’s Spotify lookalike website and presented with a message they did not expect:

Spotify is now available in Israel, but not for the thousands of hard of hearing.

Playing music too loudly means many youngsters are finding out they may need a hearing aid by the age of 40. Bekol, Israel’s organisation for the hard of hearing, is here to help prevent that and you can help.

After 30 seconds to read the message (Israel had waited long enough for Spotify) Spotify long enough, they were automatically redirected to the real Spotify website.

Hacking Spotify enabled Bekol to get its message to the internet’s hardest to reach demographic. “A message which they may not want to hear, but may not be able to in the near future,” BBR Saatchi & Saatchi noted.