Results and Effectiveness

On the day the campaign went live, there was so much online chatter that our target of 10,000 likes was achieved within 24 hours. New milestones were set, and all-up we received over 34,500 public declarations of people wanting others to slow down (a quarter of them young males), 1.6m views on Facebook, over 10,000 comments on the Facebook page, and 10m impressions on Twitter. Not bad for a town of 45 people now called SpeedKills!

Creative Execution

Our strategy was to create an anti speeding movement that everyone could rally around. To help us we found a tiny town called Speed (population 45), buried in the Australian outback. They agreed to change their town's name to SpeedKills if enough people liked the idea on Facebook. We created documentary-style videos featuring the townsfolk. No actors, no scripts, just real people telling their stories about speeding. The content was used throughout the campaign. It populated our Facebook page, was posted on video sharing sites and dispatched to media outlets to generate PR. All the activity drove people back to Facebook to register their support though a ‘like’. We monitored the campaign closely and introduced new targets and incentives to our growing community if they reached them. As the campaign grew we introduced new content and supported it with; Twitter and blogger outreach, SEM, Video seeding, and Facebook advertising.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Speeding on rural roads is a major cause of deaths in Australia. In fact, deaths have increased by 20% in the last year. The TAC is tasked with reducing this figure, however the usual shock tactics weren't working. In an effort to reduce the road toll, we targeted 'permissive speeders'; the Australians who believe there's nothing wrong with driving over the speed limit. We needed a radically different approach to changing their behaviour. Two insights propelled the campaign: Commitment: if we could create a small action (liking on Facebook) we could trigger a larger behaviour change (slowing down). Social Norming: people look to others to determine the appropriate mode of behaviour, so a mass movement rejecting speeding would really make an impact. So rather than send another top-down message from the Government, we went to a very special rural community and asked them to promote the message on our behalf.