Ads bring down Aussie road deaths - temporarily
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 1993-06-15
This article originally appeared in Vol. 3, Number 2 of Driver/Education, in June 1993.
Editor's note
Correspondent Gordon Drennan recently informed us (March 2003) that subsequent research released at Australia's 2000 National Road Safety Conference and published on the conference's web "concluded that all the reduction in the road toll that occurred at the time of the advertising campaign could be accounted for by other factors such as seasonal, economic, and political." A paper on the new evidence is on the Queensland Government web site.
The power of accurately focussed advertising to change driver behavior has been demonstrated very effectively in the Australian State of Victoria. A few years ago, traffic fatalities were approaching a 10-year high and it seemed the public were becoming complacent about it. New York-based Grey Advertising Inc. was given the task of developing a tough advertising campaign to combat the carnage. The campaign is reckoned to have played a major part in making Victorian roads among the safest in the world.
Advertising researchers found that focus groups were little affected by the kind of brutal advertisements featuring smashed cars and bodies, often used in such campaigns. "We found that when you're dealing with death, people are pretty quick to bring the shutters down," said Greg Harper, a Grey partner. "They laughed at the commercials."
Grey came up with a new genre of commercials that focussed on the effects of crashes on others. They found that people don't worry as much about being killed themselves as they do about killing or causing hurt to someone else, particularly someone they love. One commercial featured a mother cradling a son killed on a crosswalk by a speeder; another a youth with a broken neck crying over a brother he'd killed in a drunk driving crash.
Victoria road deaths last year were half the 1989 total. It is reported that auto body shop business is down by a third and there is a shortage of donated transplant organs. The effects of the commercials seems to be short-lived, however. When the ads were stopped, the crash rate immediately started to rise again.
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