Accenture Song Spain Shifts Perspectives for DGT’s Provoking Road Safety Campaign
Usually the conversion about drunk driving and its impact centres around the victim. In Spain, DGT (Directorate-General for Traffic) asked Accenture Song Spain to shift the perspective and make anyone who has driven or considered driving while drunk imagine what their life would be like if they caused an accident or a fatality.
The provoking campaign doesn’t shy away from visually representing the physical impact a drunk driver has on a victim. The injuries look real and feel real; it’s uncomfortable to watch - as it should be. The campaign was built around a key insight that living with the guilt of killing or injuring someone while driving drunk would leave a life-long impact on the drivers’ lives. This idea is distilled into a powerful and plain slogan: “When you kill someone on the road, you kill them every day of your life."
“Before approaching the campaign, we conducted research to understand which consequences the respondents feared the most in the hypothetical scenario of being responsible for an accident resulting in death. The response was unanimous: guilt was the most feared consequence by all the targets, ahead of going to jail or suffering severe physical injuries. Taking someone else's life is not something that dissipates with time. The memory becomes a constant companion that never leaves you and ends up determining your future life. Unfortunately, in many cases, when you kill someone, two lives are lost. This is how the slogan emerged,” explains Juan Silva, chief creative officer of Accenture Song in Spain.
The slogan is reiterated in three films that take the literalism of physical harm and combine it with the magic realism of the victims - injured or dead - speaking to the drivers and countering their excuses for drunk driving, not allowing them even a momentary escape from the guilt. The campaign is aimed primarily at Spain’s younger population as they’re more likely to engage in reckless driving. This demographic was targeted further through a number of digital touchpoints, like Telegram and Instagram, so they could further experience what that guilt would feel like.
Today, LBB caught up with Juan Silva, chief creative officer of Accenture Song Spain, to find out how the team came up with the campaign, how they ensured that the subject was treated with care and sensitivity, and why receiving criticism shows that the campaign worked.
LBB> When did you first start working with DGT on this campaign and what was DGT’s brief like?
Juan> We began working on the campaign in April this year. The client’s brief stated how they wanted to address the issue of drunk driving from a different perspective, switching the focus to the driver instead of the victim. And change the discussion to being about the one who lives instead of the one who dies.
LBB> The campaign is built around the insight that living with daily guilt - as reflected in the campaign’s name - is the most serious consequence of causing an accident while driving drunk. Tell us how you uncovered this insight.
Juan> This point of view is the result of conversations with the DGT. They have been witnessing these acts and their consequences for many years. They know real cases of shattered lives after fatal traffic accidents. Talking with them we realised that there was something very powerful in the feeling of guilt and how instead of being mitigated over time it grows inside you until it occupies everything.
LBB> The campaign is expressed through a very powerful slogan: “When you kill someone on the road, you kill them every day of your life." - How did you know this was the right one?
Juan> Because it is powerful and speaks of a continuous present, an action that happened in the past but that you relive every day. When it came out it was clear to me that it could not be broken.
LBB> How did you develop and decide on the three distinct films and their characters?
Juan> We tried to speak to a mostly younger target audience because young people have less perception of danger and are more likely to be involved in fatal accidents. We produced two films. In one we deal with the guilt of killing an innocent person you do not know and in the other film we portray the guilt of killing a friend, someone important to you. We made a further film, not to exclude other targets because such a misfortune can happen to you at any age. In it we treat the subject from the perspective of the guilt created by killing someone who is also a parent, with all the collateral damage that this implies.
To create the stories we started from specific scripts, but the final writing and the details of each story were completed once we had defined the casting. The dynamics between the actors and what they portrayed when they played together influenced us a lot.
LBB> The three powerful films employ elements of magical realism and documentary - why did you choose to incorporate these elements into the films?
Juan> We wanted to avoid the horror tone and formal sophistication because it was very important for us to reflect how guilt affects you in your everyday environment. The contrast of presenting the consequences on the body of the victims in such circumstances generates a sense of strangeness that is unpleasant and above all uncomfortable. And that played in favour of the film.
LBB> You also developed a website where users can, through a digital experience, put themselves in Cristina’s shoes. Why did you choose Cristina’s story specifically and what does the digital experience add to the campaign?
Juan> As the campaign was aimed primarily at a young target audience, it was important that it worked well in the digital environment. In addition to the website, we created a Telegram group where you could view the daily conversations between Cristina and Lolo. We also created an Instagram profile for Cristina where you could see through her photos and comments how that idea of guilt never disappeared from her head.
LBB> Can you share any results about the campaign’s effectiveness?
Juan> The campaign was launched less than a month ago and has achieved significant results in the media. It has gathered over 100 media impacts at the national level and has become a topic of conversation in major radio shows and television discussions. There has even been criticism of the harshness of the campaign, another criticism was that we humanised the culprits.
The two comments in my opinion are positive. The first one: because I believe that a traffic campaign can’t afford to go unnoticed, so that the images in the campaign stay in the viewer's mind demonstrates its impact.
As for humanising the culprits, for me that is the key to the campaign. Any of us can make a mistake like that. This doesn't just happen to bad people, it can happen to anyone.
