The ad’s soundtrack is a rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 classic “Sound of Silence,” re-recorded by Amira Unplugged, a partially deaf African-American Muslim singer. Campbell said the song’s opening lyrics inspired the concept for the film: “Hello darkness my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.”
The sound captures the intensity of the action and real moments from the game, such as how players use vibrations as signals and how the coach gets their attention from the sidelines.
“We wanted the viewer to feel they were with the player,” said Campbell. “We wanted it to be a hopeful piece, but also wanted to inspire and challenge at the same time.”
While AT&T wants to demonstrate 5G’s capabilities through this project, Campbell stressed that this is more than a typical ad campaign.
“If we really are in the business of ideas and creativity, we have way more power than just to make an ad,” he said. “We can actually try to solve things.”
Including the community
AT&T is among a wave of brands that have recently developed products for disabled people, from Estée Lauder’s voice-enabled makeup assistant for visually impaired users to an adaptive deodorant from Unilever’s Degree.
However, disability advocates have raised concerns that such products sometimes make no impact or exclude the very communities they were designed for. Degree’s adaptive deodorant, for example, won a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions but never hit shelves.
Campbell said that AT&T’s helmet was in the works for two years and included deaf and hard of hearing creators at every stage of the process.
His advice to other marketers attempting to make products for communities is “don’t do it in isolation.”
“Too often in advertising we get caught up in a great idea that will win the thing,” he continued. “That’s just a surface version of the power that this industry is capable of.”
AT&T and Translation are also in talks to open source the technology.
“It has more applications than what we just opened up,” said Campbell. “This is a thing that the sport needs, but it could also go somewhere else.”