Orcam BBDO Campaign Turned Election Day Into an Accessibility Statement
OrCam's "The Blind Votes" is an experiential campaign created by Gitam BBDO, Tel Aviv, that placed OrCam MyEye assistive-technology devices at Israeli voting stations on April 9, 2019, enabling visually impaired citizens to hear handwritten ballot text privately and cast their votes without assistance from a third party.
The campaign launched in Israel in April 2019, timed precisely to coincide with Israel's national general election. The strategic logic was straightforward: a democratic right is only a right when it can be exercised privately and independently. For visually impaired voters in Israel, the act of marking a ballot had historically required another person to read or complete the document — a dependency that compromises both dignity and the secrecy of the vote. OrCam, the assistive-technology company behind the MyEye device, identified this structural gap and chose one of the highest-visibility civic moments available to demonstrate its product's real-world purpose.
The OrCam MyEye device attaches to a standard pair of eyeglasses and translates visual information into audio, according to adsoftheworld.com. At participating Israeli voting centers, the device was positioned so that visually impaired voters could independently hear the text on their ballot read aloud, privately, through the device. The activation was implemented in cooperation with the Israeli Central Elections Committee and the Center for the Blind in Israel, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com. This institutional partnership gave the campaign both operational legitimacy and civic authority, distinguishing it from purely commercial experiential work. Clapboard scores "The Blind Votes" at 71 out of 100, recognising its strategic precision and cultural resonance while noting the limited breadth of its single-asset media footprint.
OrCam identified a precise moment of maximum civic relevance to demonstrate the MyEye device's core value proposition. The Israeli national election of April 9, 2019 provided a context in which independence, equality, and access were already at the centre of public discourse. Placing the product inside that context — rather than advertising around it — transformed a product demonstration into a civic act.
The broader assistive-technology market provides important strategic framing. According to apnews.com, the global assistive technologies market for the visually impaired was valued at approximately four billion dollars in 2019, with North America identified as the largest regional market at that time. In Israel, OrCam operates as a domestically founded company with global ambitions, and the 2019 election campaign was built specifically for the Israeli market before it travelled to international awards circuits. The campaign was developed at Gitam BBDO under the leadership of Chairman Ido Har-Tuv and Co-CEO Yuval Vaingest, with CEO Omri Harush and VP David Anolik contributing at the BBDO IM level, according to adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com.
OrCam's competitive landscape in the assistive-technology space includes companies such as Humanware, a manufacturer of Braille and low-vision devices, and Freedom Scientific, a producer of screen-reading software widely used by visually impaired individuals globally. Neither competitor deployed a comparable civic-experiential activation in the Israeli market during this period. OrCam's decision to partner directly with the Israeli Central Elections Committee and the Center for the Blind in Israel, as reported by adsoftheworld.com, created institutional endorsement that no paid media placement could replicate. VP Strategy Guy Vaingast shaped a brief that treated election participation not as metaphor but as the literal proof of the product's promise.
Gitam BBDO constructed "The Blind Votes" as a single, purposeful experiential gesture rather than a multi-channel campaign. The creative team — led by Chief Creative Officer and Executive Creative Director Eran Nir, with Creative Director and VP Creative Eddie Gartsman directing execution — built the work around restraint. The device itself was the creative medium. There were no actors, no dramatised scenarios, and no manufactured emotion. The MyEye unit, placed at Israeli voting centers on April 9, 2019, spoke by doing.
Art Director Amir Assayag and Copywriter Chen Federing developed the campaign's visual and verbal identity, according to clapboard.com and adsoftheworld.com. In experiential work of this nature, the copywriter's role shifts from producing taglines to defining the language of the concept — the framing that makes the gesture legible to media, juries, and the public simultaneously. The campaign's title, "The Blind Votes," operates as both noun and verb: blind people vote, and their votes are blind in the democratic sense of anonymity and equality. That duality carries significant rhetorical weight in a single phrase.
The production approach was deliberately institutional in tone. OrCam MyEye devices were deployed across Israeli voting stations in coordination with the Israeli Central Elections Committee and the Center for the Blind in Israel, as documented by adsoftheworld.com. This gave the activation the physical texture of civic infrastructure rather than brand marketing. The campaign contains one documented media asset, as noted by clapboard.com, which reflects the campaign's philosophy: one election, one device, one idea executed with precision rather than scale. No external director or production company is publicly credited for the activation, consistent with its non-filmed, real-world experiential format.
"The Blind Votes" earned a Silver Drum at the Golden Drum awards in 2019, listed under the Omni-Channel Drum category in the Sports, Pop Culture and Art section, according to goldendrum.com. The campaign was also shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2019 in the Innovation Lions category, as reported by clapboard.com, though it did not advance to a Lion. These two award outcomes position the work as creatively recognised at an international level without having achieved the top tier of Cannes recognition.
No verified commercial performance data — such as reach figures, device adoption rates, or sales impact — for "The Blind Votes" is publicly available. This is consistent with the campaign's nature as a single-day experiential activation deployed across Israeli voting stations on April 9, 2019. The absence of published metrics does not diminish the structural effectiveness of the work. An experiential campaign tied to a real civic event generates earned media, institutional credibility, and brand narrative that operates independently of paid reach figures.
The campaign's structural strength lies in its irreproducibility: it could only have been executed on one day, in one country, during one election. That specificity creates authenticity that cannot be manufactured retroactively. OrCam's decision to work through the Israeli Central Elections Committee and the Center for the Blind in Israel, as documented by adsoftheworld.com, ensured that the activation was verifiable as a real public service and not a staged demonstration. Clapboard scores the campaign 71 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual clarity and civic relevance, with the score constrained by limited media extensibility and the absence of a broader campaign ecosystem.
OrCam's "The Blind Votes" was an experiential campaign created by Gitam BBDO, Tel Aviv, launched in Israel in April 2019. OrCam MyEye devices were placed at Israeli voting stations on national election day, allowing visually impaired citizens to hear ballot text privately and vote independently without third-party assistance, according to adsoftheworld.com.
Gitam BBDO, Tel Aviv created "The Blind Votes" for OrCam. The creative team included Chief Creative Officer Eran Nir, Creative Director Eddie Gartsman, Art Director Amir Assayag, and Copywriter Chen Federing. Agency leadership included Chairman Ido Har-Tuv, Co-CEO Yuval Vaingest, CEO Omri Harush, and VP David Anolik, according to clapboard.com.
"The Blind Votes" won a Silver Drum at Golden Drum 2019 in the Omni-Channel Drum category, according to goldendrum.com. The campaign was also shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2019 in the Innovation Lions category, as reported by clapboard.com, but did not receive a Lion award.
OrCam MyEye is an assistive-technology device that attaches to eyeglasses and converts visual information into audio. At Israeli voting centers on April 9, 2019, the device read handwritten ballot text aloud privately to visually impaired voters, enabling independent participation. The activation ran in cooperation with the Israeli Central Elections Committee, according to adsoftheworld.com.
Clapboard scores "The Blind Votes" at 71 out of 100. The score reflects strong conceptual clarity and civic relevance tied to Israel's 2019 national election, while accounting for the campaign's limited media extensibility and its single documented media asset, as noted in Clapboard's editorial assessment.
OrCam and Gitam BBDO implemented "The Blind Votes" in partnership with the Israeli Central Elections Committee and the Center for the Blind in Israel, according to adsoftheworld.com. These institutional partners gave the April 2019 campaign operational authority and ensured the MyEye device deployment functioned as a verified public-service activation rather than a commercial demonstration.
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