‘Every time I told you I loved you, I was lying’: Heart Foundation campaign targets families
The Heart Foundation has launched a campaign which is likely to anger families, with a TV ad contending if you don’t look after your health, you don’t love your family enough.
The ‘Heartless Words’ campaign by Host/Havas features one mother telling her son “every time I said I loved you, I was lying”, and another telling her daughter she doesn’t care about her childern’s hearts.
Note: The 60-second TVC has since been removed from YouTube.
If you think the ad is terrible, check the hoarding grammar. ‘just’ should be after ‘affect’, not before.
The tvc is just horrible. Complete misread.
Disgusting, and stupid too – shaming people leads to inaction and guilt, not action and solutions. My dad has heart issues recently identified as genetic, but for the last 20 years he’s carried crippling guilt about his eating habits when he was young and the fear he did exactly what this ad says – put us through hell because he was selfish. Totally untrue and layering stress and pain over the top of feeling physically rubbish, for a group of people the HF’s website identifies as being at high risk of depression. This might have sounded cool and provocative in a meeting room, but it’s self righteous and destructive for the people they’re meant to be helping,
Youch…this is what happens when an agency tries to do ‘something different’ – charity marketing is about tugging on heart strings (no pun intended) and eliciting emotion to drive an action, I can’t help feeling they got this really wrong…
Truly insensitive and appalling execution on an important message. Absolute train wreck
That is truly horrible. Zero understanding of what impacts human behaviour…
Absolutely appalling, unsophisticated and completely tone deaf attempt at behavior change. Won’t be donating to the Heart Foundation in the future.
Can’t wait for this to show up on every Top Ten Advertising Fails listicle for 2019. We’re living in history, folks.
Looks like ‘the Labour didn’t get in, my life is over’ squad have found something else to whine about. At least, the Heart Foundation have a pulse and are trying…
This is a very I’ll considered spot by Host/Havas and the heart foundation. Quite appalling not surprised they had to pull it.
I am not a fan of this campaign at all. I heard it on the radio yesterday and it just didn’t sit well with me at all. I’m sure this will get people talking, but I’m not convinced it will be for the right reasons.
This is horrible. Shame on the client and agency for this. In a pathetic attempt to be shocking (and presumably win awards) you’ve delivered something so lacking in actual humanity and anything that resembles real life experience.
Children who have lost a parent or loved one to heart disease don’t need to be told by a TVC that their mother/father didn’t love them! This is wrong on so many levels and really disappointing. If the client and agency put the consumer at the centre of their comms, they would have know at script stage that this was insensitive and totally lacks empathy. Not all PR is good PR.
Pretty good example of good insight, poor (read: terrible) execution.
Insight: busy lifestyles = people are even more reactive than ever, prioritising everyday ‘stuff’, even over their own (heart) health.
Execution: vomit.
Playing devils advocate here: I absolutely hated watching this ad…but I watched it and resolved to go and get that long put off cholesterol test.
Lets be clear – nothing is helping Australian’s look after their hearts. The Heart Foundation have tried inspirational, they’ve tried being kind, fun, funny, empathetic. And it hasn’t worked. Perhaps they’ve just decided that it’s time for some tough love.
As someone who has watched a close relative squander their second chance at having a healthy heart – despite him having small children who depended on him – I have actually thought this very sentiment about him several times over.
As long as the media buy avoids young demos, then I think we should give this ad a chance to see if it work.
I get what you’re saying devil, but were any of those approaches conceived, executed and crafted brilliantly? Sure, kind, fun, funny are approaches, but they will never work if done badly. Done brilliantly, each would have been the perfect motivator for heart health.
Being devil’s advocate is important on an issue this serious. I think the problem is it’s so scornful.
Similar insights have been used more sensitively to change drink driving habits, tobacco usage and on sun protection, but they weren’t so nasty and withering about the things that matter most to people.
The problem isn’t that parents don’t love their kids. The problem is that they’re so overloaded and stressed out – partly by the stress of parenthood – that they’re not being rational in their choices.
Dear Devil’s Advocate,
Exactly right.
If you really love your family and are at risk of heart attack get a heart check.
Sometimes negative messaging is needed to spark behaviour.
Well done Heart Foundation.
Great idea to get a heart health check – probably 1,000 different ways this message could have been executed better! Perhaps starting by testing it with family members impacted by heart disease (who are often generous supporters of the cause!).
As someone left behind by a family member with heart disease that was detected, hearing that they were lying when they said they loved me is beyond insensitive.
my sentiments exactly and I likened this confronting ad to many government health campaigns – AIDS bowling, Cigarette smoking and cancers… It takes a lot to get people to act these days, and the HF needed to drill a point home, and whilst shocking, it has people talking and more importantly, people taking action.
The comms aren’t designed to talk to children but adults and elderly, and surely they’ll understand the type of approach. If they get upset by it and move into consideration or an action phase, then its worked, hasn’t it?
Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. Follow cardiologist Dr Ross Walker’s advice and get a coronary calcium score.
Should’ve got Kendall Jenner to star in it.
The defensive response from the CEO doesn’t help either – “we have to start the conversation”…what conversation? How selfish people with heart problems are? How their families should take it personally? How the irrational abandonment people feel when a loved one dies is actually…fair enough?
This kind of “tough love” is just judgement. Bullying people doesn’t make them eat better, it just satisfies the need to yell at people.
I totally get why they went in this direction. But the tone is totally wrong. As if parents don’t feel enough pressure and guilt already just trying to bring up their kids.
It’s probably a good place to make parents think about the impact on their kids, but this kind of approach just makes the brand look bad.
If this campaign has been justified to the Board as a worthwhile risk to get people talking about the issue, the entire Board & marketing team deserve to be sacked. The Australian public doesn’t tolerate victim shaming anymore. It’s not clever, it’s ugly & a total waste of taxpayer dollars.
Taxpayer dollars???
I have vivid memories of laying intensive care, caring less about the cardiac crisis than the trauma etched in my parents’ faces. I’ve never felt so horrendously, helplessly guilty, and I had a genetic thing, not a diet-related thing.
Thanks agency team for bringing all that trauma back again…I get what you’re trying to do but both the client and agency are like bulls in a china shop here, and should know better
My young niece and nephew lost their 40 year old father to a massive heart attack. He had no idea he had a heart condition. He loved his children more than his own life.
Hurtful and heartless.
Listen to the feedback and take it off air.
My family won’t donate to the Heart Foundation ever again!
As reported in the ABC article about this, a tweet replying to someone saying they will avoid supporting the Heart Foundation now:
@Missy__M
I get your anger but please support them still! If anything it’s whoever their ad agency was who should be punished.
No, the brands are solely responsible for the comms put in market. NOT the agency.
Depends on the situation. If the brief was to give a sharp wake up call without this kind of collateral damage, then the agency totally missed the mark, and the client is reliant on their expertise. But we aren’t talking about a local start up charity here, there are heavy hitters on the HF board and in their marketing area. They really should have known how sensitive this area is. It seems like they pushed the envelope on the serial killers campaign (which was a great use of the tactic) and got totally carried away. The strategy is so focused on cut through it’s lost empathy for their most powerful brand ambassadors and champions of the message: the people directly impacted by heart disease and those who love them.
To those upset about the “idiot brigade” “whinging”…this is an important issue. Pointless outrage does nothing, no matter what side of the argument you’re on. What’s needed here is careful analysis of what went wrong and how to get such an important message right. All marketers, especially charities, would be wise to pay attention. And get their damn hearts checked, so something good comes out of it.
The DrinkWise ‘Kids Absorb Your Drinking’ campaign springs to mind as a way of explaining a similar message – that you’re behaviour impacts your family – in a much smarter execution. It’s still confronting and may not be exactly comfortable to watch, but it doesn’t say that parents who drink in front of their kids don’t love their kids.