Social Media Beyond the ‘Like’, with Lisa Hale, Specsavers Head of Brand Communications

Breaking down silos unlocks a more powerful, joined-up brand strategy

Earned media matters for Specsavers, particularly on social. A reactive stunt (such as recent examples like a van parked on a bollard, or a piece of Oasis-themed copywriting) can earn organic reach first, then be amplified with paid spend if it gains traction. This model works for Specsavers in part because tone of voice is treated as a non-negotiable. The brand understands the value of its voice and actively maintains it as an asset.

My single piece of advice would be for your teams to be integrated and that doesn’t just mean just a weekly catch up in the calendar.  – Lisa Hale, Head of Broadcast PR, Social & Partnerships at Specsavers

Specsavers has done a lot of work to dismantle internal silos. The result of these efforts is a team that thinks about content more holistically, something that has only become more important as the digital landscape had evolved.

Earned-first, culturally embedded campaigns drive results

Hale highlighted three Specsavers’ campaigns that demonstrate what happens when a brand leads with culture rather than media spend.

‘Best Worst Team’ began as an organic pilot with no media budget, following the UK’s worst Sunday league football team as it received Premier League coaching, sight and hearing tests, and full star treatment.  Econometric modelling showed ‘Best Worst Team’ delivered double the ROI of Specsavers’ best-ever TV ad, with brand awareness up 10% among the target audience and 70% of viewers more likely to consider Specsavers. 

When you take an earned first approach the idea becomes the strategy not just the channel. – Lisa Hale, Head of Broadcast PR, Social & Partnerships at Specsavers

The audiology campaigns tackled a harder problem, that of hearing test avoidance. Research had shown that people delay getting a hearing test for up to 10 years because it makes them feel old.

‘Misheard Lyrics’ bypassed that stigma by anonymously releasing a deliberately garbled re-recording of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ — framed as the world’s first mass hearing test. It generated a huge number of plays and significant uplift in hearing-test bookings.

Another highly creative campaign in audiology tapped into the power of surprise. ‘Relationship Aid’ reframed hearing aids as intimacy devices ahead of Valentine’s Day, revealing the product only after generating curiosity through working with a major relationship influencer.

Hearing aids were searched more than vibrators during the campaign period, with sales of hearing aids also up significantly. These audiology campaigns contributed to a significant reduction in hearing loss denial. A shift that benefits not just the brand but the public as a whole.

Holding attention is the key to shifting consideration

Hale shared research that shifting consideration requires a viewer to spend at least 10 seconds engaging with content. Specsavers formalised this as ‘Project 10,’ an internal benchmark that focuses on holding that all important attention.

The logic for this is straightforward, as Hale shared with roughly 10,000 ads encountered per day, most placements generate only 1–2 seconds of view time. That is enough to register a brand name but not enough to change how someone feels about it. Since the move to attention based measurement consideration scores have risen steadily for Specsavers.

These findings were codified into Specsavers’s CAR framework: Consideration equals Audience plus Resonance. Audience covers right person, right time, right place; Resonance covers attention, sentiment, and key message takeout. All of that together drives consideration.

CAR gives the team a simple, business-facing language for defending high-attention, earned-led investment in budget conversations.

The framework is increasingly relevant as the Meta Andromeda update and similar AI systems shift platforms toward interest-based curation, where creative quality increasingly determines whether content reaches people at all. For Hale, the Andromeda update has significant implications for the future of communications and specifically the increased importance of the creative idea.

Specsavers’ experience shows that integration, culture-first thinking, and attention-based measurement are not just strategic ideals, they produce measurable commercial results. The clearest takeaway from this conversation with Lisa Hale and Specsavers’ success is to earn your audience’s attention, and the route to that is collaboration and creativity.