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

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. This resulted in charming directional prompts such as “All set. Don’t forget your seat belt”, “Re-routing. Eyes on the Road!” and “Accident reported ahead. Please be careful, OK?” We also created a charming video to introduce Maxis Safe Mode to Malaysian drivers by teaching kids on ways to steal their parents’ smartphones away from them for a few seconds to download the voicepack on Waze. Then we spread the word via Maxis' social media and PR. But earned media helped too and Safe Mode generated a lot of publicity on its own.

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.

What if we were able to put a kid (virtually) in every car to encourage safer driving? 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. With a tweak of a voice, we managed to turn smartphone usage from a distraction into an idea that makes a difference.