What if you were invited to your own funeral?

Background

No-one in Belgium appeared to consider the dangers of driving even a few km/h faster than the maximum speed limit yet every year hundreds of people were killed and even more injured as a result of speeding.

Drivers simply never thought about how the consequences of an accident would be devastating to the many people close to them.

Idea

People who had been clocked speeding were sent an invitation by a friend or family member to meet up. What they did not realise was that they were being invited to their own funerals.

Caught on film, they arrived at the meeting place to discover the funeral had already started. Asked to take the only seat left, they heard the Master of ceremonies deliver a discourse on the acceptance of death. Then they saw their own families and friends deliver speeches about the sense of loss they felt because their friend or son had died in a speeding accident.

Each speech ended with the speeder being looked in the eye and told that he or she was much loved and no-one there wanted to have to sit at their funeral for real.

The title at the end of the video read: 'Make your loved ones slow down before it's too late. Find advice and good arguments at ilestpartitropvite.be.'

Results

Within 24 hours, the film had had more than 1,500.000 views on YouTube, almost all from Belgium, the primary target audience.

It stimulated 24,000 tweets with 550 articles in newspapers and blogs, appearing on the news of all the major Belgian TV channels.

After a week, the video had attracted 3.1m views. And counting.

Our Thoughts

The secret of success on YouTube is not to write an advertisement. That is a piece of fiction, often with actors, and is written around a product attribute. The best YouTube content, on the other hand, is often a story that shows real people in real situations in which the whole point is to share your values with the viewer.

This is not easy to do because it means writing about people rather than about brands – and having ideas which hold attention because the viewers can see themselves in the picture. In other words, it means being genuinely creative.

I have watched plenty of advertisements, warning me not to speed. Some are shocking slo-mo crashes, others show wreckage and suggest horrible consequences. They are stories I look at. This, by contrast, draws me in. And it prompts me to ask myself, how would I feel if my daughter killed herself?

That’s great storytelling, when you become a part of the story. And don’t ask me why but the Belgians seem to be incredibly good at it.