With awards season in full swing, Curated is pleased to announce three wins in partnership with Specsavers UK for our work on the Covid-19 Care Hub. We took home the Masterclassing Award for Most Effective Branded Content Campaign, and at the UK Content Awards, we won Health Content Campaign of the Year and the Silver Award for Content Strategy of the Year. It makes us so proud to be recognized amongst some of the most respected agencies and brands in the country, and even prouder to have taken home a number of prizes. A huge thank you and congratulations to the Curated and Specsavers teams — here’s to more success!
The Awards
The Winning Work
March 2020 was an uncertain time for all businesses across the UK and Ireland. While many were forced to close due to Government restrictions, Specsavers remained open, providing essential eye and hearing services to those in need.
With ever-changing guidance and clinical research connecting COVID-19 to eye and hearing conditions, Specsavers partnered with Curated to pivot their content activity to support customers and communities through lockdown uncertainty. The resulting Covid-19 Care Hub housed articles and videos ranging from eye health and hearing advice, to myth-busting articles. Topics were identified through Curated’s Assurance Framework, which used search listening to identify emerging health trends, such as blue light glasses and conjunctivitis, in real-time.
Our team used Assurance to identify trending eye and hearing health FAQs emerging in real-time. We then selected key insights within Specsavers’ expertise to be developed into content for the hub, working closely with clinical experts to ensure content was factual and informative. The resulting content responded directly to highly-searched customer queries and emerging clinical research.
Examples included the rapid rise in searches for ‘how to stop glasses fogging up with a mask’ and ‘blue light glasses’ due to the rise in people working from home. With research finding no proven eye health benefit of wearing blue light glasses, Specsavers responded quickly with a blue light myth-busting article, collaborating with the College of Optometrists to debunk claims and help customers make informed health decisions. Through this framework, we were also able to detect a rise in Google searches for COVID-related eye symptoms including conjunctivitis and eye pain, which preceded research later proving them as symptoms.
Content also played a role in ensuring customers received the right type of care during lockdown by signposting towards Specsavers’ Remote Care service. Here they would receive a free, online health consultation with an expert to determine the best treatment pathway. From customer surveys, we also detected a high level of anxiety around store visits, which left many at risk of missing essential healthcare. In response, we developed specific content around store visits, communicating the new safety measures in place from PPE to social distancing, to help customers feel safer and more comfortable when visiting.
2020 was the year of taking healthcare into our own hands. Customer access to free, honest, and expert knowledge, with confidence in its accuracy, has never been more important. Through the COVID Care Hub, we were able to solidify Specsavers as a trusted voice by providing genuinely useful and authoritative health content — from eye health tips and hearing advice to myth-busting articles. Ultimately, our real-time search insights met the needs of the public by addressing their key concerns, cutting through the noise online, and ensuring those in need received essential care at a very difficult and unsettling time.
You can read the full case study here.
Words from the client
“As happened to many other businesses, CV19 caught us off-guard whilst we concentrated on longer term plans. Curated helped us re-set that long-sighted focus on the immediate term: dealing with the ever-changing landscape whilst this (I daresay) unprecedented pandemic tightened its grip across the globe. With government guidelines and research showing new evidence daily, Curated used up-to-date search insights to help us carve a path through the noise and ensure information that made its way on to our site was fit for purpose, with the right content coming in the right context and at the right time. To paraphrase Kipling slightly, Curated managed to keep their head when all about them were losing theirs....“
- ADAM KENNEDY | SENIOR DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER AT SPECSAVERS
Words from our founder
'So proud - especially given that it was for a product which prior to lockdown we didn’t offer, and which has since become our hero product. The impact of Covid on our business was huge - we had to quickly pivot and adapt to build a new product which has proved so successful for Specsavers, which made winning an award for this work all the more sweeter.'
- SIMON DOUGLASS | FOUNDER OF CURATED
Another huge thank you and congratulations to everyone involved — here’s to more success in the future!
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