The Campaign

When you have kids in the car, you drive that much safer. But let’s be honest here, most Malaysians are a little more careless when they’re driving alone. In fact, while we were mining for insights, we found out that 9 out of 10 drivers agree that they drive safer with kids in their car. Now the last thing the world needs, is another GPS app. With 4.4 million users on Waze, working with them was the best way for scale our idea.

Creative Execution

We created Safe Mode. The world’s first kid-sourced GPS voicepack. We invited Malaysian kids to volunteer their voices and created Safe Mode, the world’s first kid-sourced GPS voicepack, tailor-made to help guide Malaysians home safely. An entire campaign was built around this idea. From call for entries, to recording, to launch. We got the entire nation involved and held an audition to 'kid-source' Malaysians aged between 3 and 12. Some 100 parents volunteered and a total of 60 kids were shortlisted, with 20 picked for the final recording.

Safe Mode generated a total PR value of over USD 14 million, and even got featured on NBC, Today Show and Bloomberg. It was so popular Waze made it available worldwide and the largest number of users outside of Malaysia were Americans. The voicepack has been downloaded 970,000 times to date. With 4.4 million active Malaysian Waze users, that's 1 out of 4 Malaysians using our voicepack. Maxis brand health tracking showed that scores on 'data quality', 'innovation' and 'digitally driven' have improved as compared to competitors. We still get emails from parents around the world asking to have their kids featured in the next edition of the voicepack.

The voicepack function of Waze has traditionally been a medium for brands to put character voices as an entertaining way to promote their brand. With the Maxis Safe Mode voicepack, we changed the rules. It became the world’s first voicepack designed to help parents drive safely.