Brief Explanation

Australia is known as the ‘Wide Brown Land’ this is reference to its sheer scale and the expanses of its famous outback. The challenge that this creates for our client the Transport Accident Commission (TAC) is that once drivers leave the city and enter the countryside they fail to respect the speed limits. The result was a 20% increase* in deaths in the last year. The TAC tasked us with raising awareness of rural speeding. As no awareness figures existed we would be measured on the exposure our campaign garnered and the level of engagement it achieved. Our strategy was as follows. First we would need to make drivers aware that people actually lived in these rural areas. Then we wanted to ensure that the message wasn’t coming directly from the TAC – a government body known for public announcement advertising. Instead we wanted to find a way for the community to publicly announce their objection to rural speeding. Finally, as we wanted to achieve genuine scale, we would deploy a ‘social norming’ approach. This is where people look to others to determine the appropriate mode of behaviour. We resolved to create an anti speeding movement that everyone could rally around, to help we found a tiny town called ‘Speed’ (population 45) in the outback. But how to activate ‘social norming’? Well we decided to give the people of Australia a cause to embrace, we gave them the opportunity to decide if ‘Speed’ should change it’s name to ‘SpeedKills’. We established a simple mechanic to facilitate involvement; if 10,000** people ‘liked’ the idea of the name change on Facebook it would actually happen. Our next job was generating awareness of the campaign. We wanted to make the townsfolk of Speed the hero’s so rather than using actors and writing scripts we sent a small film crew to the town and captured a series of vignettes featuring them to run within social channels. 10,000 likes were achieved within 24 hours but we kept the campaign momentum going by setting new targets, ultimately hitting 33,311***. The awareness the campaign garnered was significant with AU$7.6 million**** in earned media. In ROI terms when compared to our budget the ratio was 1:126. For every dollar we spent we generated $126.00 in earned media. Engagement was also extremely high, there were over 10,200,000 impressions of the message on Twitter and 1,641,000 people viewed the Facebook page.