Brief Explanation

Road safety ads must be believable, or the message is dismissed. The hardest to reach and most cynical audience are people who use drugs and drive. For many, it’s everyday behaviour and they think they’re safe. In their eyes, no one is less qualified to talk about drugs than the government. Our task was to make a commercial that made drug users question their ability drive. To work, the script must be completely convincing. We wrote realistic situations of stoned people in shops and the strange things they do. We cast actual shopkeepers to appear in these shops and comment on the stoned people’s behaviour. We wrote lines of dialogue the shopkeepers, who weren’t actual actors, could say convincingly and which stoned people would believe. The script, and the resulting commercial, was accepted by the audience as genuine. Lines of dialogue have since become vernacular speech among the audience: “12 Frosty Pigs”, “My soap is not funny”, “Why the lady looking at the cat?” The ad has succeeded in making drug users ask themselves if they should be driving.