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Cochlear Hid a Hearing Test Inside a Love Story
Cochlear's 'Does Love Last Forever?' is a short film released in Australia in February 2017 that embeds a functional hearing test inside a cinematic love story, delivering two entirely different narrative outcomes depending on the viewer's hearing ability.
Created with agency CHE Proximity, the campaign targets the 3.5 million Australians living with some form of hearing loss — 85 percent of whom take no action about their condition. Rather than issuing a conventional public health prompt, Cochlear commissioned a short film that follows a couple across four decades of shared life. The dual-outcome structure is the campaign's central mechanism: viewers with normal hearing experience a relationship that endures, while those with diminished hearing perceive the same footage as a story of gradual estrangement and loss. The film functions simultaneously as entertainment and clinical instrument, making the diagnostic moment invisible until it has already occurred.
In the Australian market, where awareness and inaction around hearing loss represent a substantial public health challenge, the campaign set a deliberately ambitious objective: to bring 50,000 people aged 55 and over to test their hearing within twelve months. The film premiered in cinemas ahead of screenings of the film Lion, extending its reach through a dedicated microsite at doeslovelastforever.com, social teasers, digital display, public relations activity, and broadsheet coverage. Cochlear earns a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100 for this campaign, reflecting the strength of its creative strategy, media integration, and measurable health impact.
Cochlear identifies a specific behavioural barrier at the heart of this campaign: the majority of Australians with hearing loss actively avoid addressing it. With 3.5 million Australians affected and 85 percent taking no action, the challenge is not awareness in the abstract but the psychology of denial — particularly among adults aged 55 and over, who form the campaign's primary audience.
Shaun Hand, General Manager Australia and New Zealand at Cochlear, articulates the stakes directly: 'We know how many precious things are lost for those people living with hearing loss.' The strategic insight is that conventional health communications — clinical prompts, symptom checklists, GP referrals — fail to reach people who do not perceive themselves as patients. CHE Proximity's response is to meet that audience inside a format they would voluntarily seek out: a love story in a cinema. By disguising the diagnostic mechanism as narrative, the campaign bypasses the defensive posture that stops most health messaging from landing.
According to the Australian Parliament House, hearing loss carries significant social and economic consequences for individuals and communities across Australia, lending urgency to interventions that actually shift behaviour at scale. The media strategy reinforces the creative premise: premiering the film ahead of Lion — itself a story about family, memory, and belonging — places the content in front of an emotionally primed audience already open to long-form narrative. The choice to support the cinema launch with PR, broadsheet coverage, and social distribution reflects a deliberate effort to extend the film's reach beyond the cinema screen and into domestic conversations, particularly among families of people who may be, as Hand put it, 'in denial about their hearing loss.'
Director Pete Baker leads the production of 'Does Love Last Forever?', working with production companies Revolver and Will O'Rourke, alongside creative collaborators The Glue Society and Noise International. The film's premise demands an unusual degree of technical precision: the same footage must tell two emotionally coherent but narratively opposite stories, with the divergence determined entirely by what the viewer can and cannot hear.
Sound Designer Kathleen Burrows is central to that achievement. The on-screen execution follows a couple through four decades of shared life — arguments, reconciliations, tender domestic moments, and the particular silences that accumulate between people over time. For viewers with full hearing, the dialogue and ambient audio resolve these moments into warmth and continuity. For viewers whose hearing is diminished, specific frequencies are attenuated or obscured, causing the same scenes to read as misunderstanding, withdrawal, and slow emotional deterioration. The couple's relationship does not change; what changes is the viewer's access to the sound that gives it meaning.
Various audio and film techniques are deployed throughout to ensure the perceptual split is reliable rather than incidental. The craft challenge is that the film must work emotionally in both registers — it cannot feel broken or incomplete in either version, because a viewer who senses something is wrong with the film rather than with their own hearing will disengage before the diagnostic moment lands. The result is a production in which sound design is not a support element but the structural logic of the entire piece, with Burrows and Baker engineering an experience that is simultaneously a cinema short, a public health intervention, and a clinically functional hearing assessment.
The campaign exceeds its stated objective by a significant margin. According to the Media Federation of Australia, 110,000 people tested their hearing within five months of the campaign's launch — more than double the 50,000-person target that had been set for a full twelve-month window. The budget for the campaign, as reported by the Media Federation of Australia, sits at 235,000 Australian dollars, placing it in the best use of a small budget category.
Recognition follows at both Australian and international levels. According to the Media Federation of Australia, the campaign wins Gold in Best Communications Strategy at the Media Federation of Australia Awards in 2019. At the international level, the campaign wins four Lion awards at Cannes Lions and Lions Health in 2017, according to Lions Health records. These results position 'Does Love Last Forever?' as one of the more decorated healthcare communications campaigns to emerge from Australia in that period.
No verified data on conversion from hearing test to clinical consultation or device purchase is publicly available beyond the testing numbers. What the results do confirm is that the disguised-test format resolves the central strategic problem the campaign is designed to address: it moves a population that systematically avoids health interventions into a diagnostic moment they did not anticipate and therefore did not resist. The structural effectiveness of the campaign lies precisely in that sleight of hand — a cinematic love story that doubles as a public health tool, delivered at scale on a budget that most broadcast campaigns would not consider sufficient for production alone.
'Does Love Last Forever?' is a 2017 Australian short film by Cochlear that functions as a hearing test in disguise. The film follows a couple over 40 years and uses audio techniques to deliver two different narrative outcomes — one for viewers with normal hearing and one for those with hearing loss — prompting them to seek a clinical hearing assessment.
Pete Baker directed the film, produced through Revolver and Will O'Rourke. The campaign was created by CHE Proximity for Cochlear and launched in Australia in February 2017. Sound Designer Kathleen Burrows played a central role in engineering the dual-outcome audio structure that makes the hearing test mechanism work.
According to the Media Federation of Australia, 110,000 people tested their hearing within five months of the campaign's launch. That result is more than double the original objective of 50,000 hearing tests within twelve months, making it one of the most effective hearing-loss awareness campaigns in Australia in 2017.
The campaign won four Lion awards at Cannes Lions and Lions Health in 2017, according to Lions Health records. It also won Gold in Best Communications Strategy at the Media Federation of Australia Awards in 2019, as reported by the Media Federation of Australia, recognising both creative excellence and measurable public health impact.
According to the Media Federation of Australia, the campaign was entered in the best use of a small budget category with a budget of 235,000 Australian dollars. That figure makes the 110,000 hearing tests achieved within five months a particularly strong return, and reflects CHE Proximity's media strategy of cinema placement, PR, and social distribution.
Cochlear identified that 85 percent of the 3.5 million Australians with hearing loss take no action, largely due to denial. By embedding a clinical hearing test inside an emotionally engaging love story, the campaign bypasses the defensive behaviour that typically blocks health messaging, reaching an audience aged 55 and over in a format they sought out voluntarily.
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