Tearing Up The Road

Background

Over the past three years 18,000 people have been killed or seriously injured on London’s roads. Speed is the largest single contributory factor in road collisions. Young male drivers are most prone to speeding and four times more likely to commit a speeding offence than females.

The challenge was to get this group to realise the consequences of their actions, in order to stop them speeding. The communication needed to resonate with this audience and engage them rather than lecture or patronise them. The ultimate objective was to help reduce those killed or seriously injured because of speeding by 40% by 2010.

Idea

The strategy was built on the insight that young men believe they are infallible – ‘it will never happen to me’. What motivates this audience most is how they are perceived and speeding is considered 'cool'. Telling them the risks of injuring themselves or others wasn’t going to motivate them to change their behaviour. Instead, Chemistry Communications decided to show them that losing their licence, or car, because of speeding would make them look very un-cool. The integrated campaign (traditional media was developed by M&C Saatchi) aimed to demonstrate the financial and social consequences of speeding, illustrating how points on their licence lead to increased insurance premiums, loss of their licence and of course use of their beloved car – meaning that they would regress to someone who needs ferrying around.

A viral was created in order to speak to this extremely digitally savvy audience in their own language. The driving game ‘boy racer’, circulated virally to men between the ages of 16 and 24 living in London, had all of the usual driving prompts and gadgets, but the car never moved – ending on a reveal that explained that speeding leads to loss of licence. An interactive insert, placed in key young male and driving titles, encouraged recipients to tear along the dotted line if they liked tearing up the road. The audience would then discover they had torn up their licence.

A souped up car was parked at locations and events attended by boy racers. The car appeared to be on sale – with a ‘for sale’ poster in the window – but on closer inspection and when calling the seller’s number, it transpired that this car was for sale only because the driver had too many points on his licence and couldn’t afford the insurance premiums. A face to face promotional team handed out leaflets allowing participants to enter a competition to further engage with the concept.

Results

The game was a fantastic success. The email open rate was 25% and the click through rate was 9.9% - all from cold data. There were a total of 6,445 viewings. Additionally links were placed on various online blogs, many of which incorporated great feedback: ‘This game is an awesome campaign for the London Safety Camera Partnership. It’s seems a bit like a trend to create super awesome-looking games that in fact can be called “anti games”’ (blog.coolz0r.com on 15/04/06)

Post campaign qualitative research showed that 16% of the people interviewed that had access to the internet remembered seeing the viral game. Additionally 40% of them understood the main communication objective of the campaign and 70% of them said that it made them think twice about speeding.

Target Audience

18 to 24-year-old men, living and driving in Greater London

Size

500,000 inserts, 40,000 initial recipients of viral email (forwards not recorded). The car has appeared at 12 events to date.