The Campaign

Meet Graham, the only person designed to survive on our roads. Part interactive sculpture, educational tool, Graham shows us how humans would need to change to survive a car crash. Over several months a trauma surgeon and a road safety engineer collaborated with a world-renowned artist using decades of road safety data, medical research and creativity to deliver evolution underpinned by evidence. During the process key weaknesses in the human body were identified and modified, each change told a new story, showing what happens to our bodies in common crash scenarios.

Creative Execution

Graham is a visceral experience with a simple, unavoidable message - If you don’t look like Graham then you need to slow down on our roads. But the real learning opportunity comes when you delve deeper into why he looks the way he does. Graham was launched July 2016. Visitors to the experience used Tango, Google’s augmented reality technology (a first in Australia) to go beneath his skin and better understand his anatomy. Each physiological change was a new source of information showing what happens to your body in a crash. Normally an AR experience on 3D objects requires visual tags, an impossibility as Graham is fine art. Tango became vital to the experience as it allowed us to map the entire room, then plot the hot spots on him. The immersive experience became an important tool to educate our future drivers as Graham was integrated into the school curriculum.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

To date 266,233 people have visited Graham in the flesh, with an 86% increase in gallery visitation where ever Graham visited. 1 in 6 people in regional areas having seen the exhibition. Beyond the exhibit, Graham sparked a global road safety conversation. With over 10 million website visits in 5 days, 33 million campaign views in 24hrs and 89% campaign message recall. Graham has been adopted by the W.H.O. as the global face of road safety for 2017. An indication of direct impact on consumers comes from Google. Search for ‘Graham’ and the entire first page of web results, and first 15 images, are all of the ‘Meet Graham’ campaign, achieved organically through user action ($0 on SEO).

People understand that car crashes are traumatic, but as soon as you try to explain concepts like ‘kinetic energy’ or ‘impact force’ their eyes glaze over. So we went back to something every single road user could identify with; the human form. Throughout the process, decades of road safety data and medical research was interpreted and filtered by our key contributors Trauma Surgeon Christian Kenfield, Road Safety Engineer Dr David Logan and TAC’s own road safety researchers. This data helped identify the key weaknesses in the human body, which were then visualized by our artist, Patricia Piccinni. We then invited people to Meet Graham.