Safety council moves from blood and gore to sex and seat-belts

ADVERTISING/MARKETING: There's a lot of grunting and groaning in the National Safety Council's (NSC) new radio advertisement. Amid all the panting and heavy breathing, there's an urgent "stop it" from a female voice and the question "Clicked Yet?" punctuates the groans.

Just when you think you've stumbled on the first, albeit quite bizarre, Irish advertising campaign for condoms, the punch line reveals it's an advertisement for seat belts, which, it says, we'd be naked without.

The "Clicked Yet?" campaign is supported by the Ford dealers of Ireland and is the first time a car company has supported an NSC media campaign.

There's also an outdoor element to the campaign, which will have a €150,000 media spend during the summer months. The agency behind the campaign is McCann Erickson in Belfast. The poster is a surreal looking 48-sheet with four young people on a beach sitting in deck chairs wearing seat-belts.

While it's by no means the only cheesy looking and sounding advertising campaign on air at the moment, it is worth comment because, as 360-degree turns go, this takes beating. On television, the seat-belt message is gory and bloody, with young people dying in a car crash. The most sickening sound in that NSC television advertisement is the crunch as the young man without a seat belt ricochets into his girlfriend's head.

There's a well-aired debate questioning the effectiveness of shock tactics in public safety campaigns and this new approach would appear to indicate that the NSC has decided that a more light-hearted, sexy approach could yield results. A spokeswoman for the council said it was not an overall change of strategy and that the campaign was themed to fit in with a more upbeat summer mood.

"We're trying to cajole people to use their seat belts in this campaign," she said. She said young people could relate to the images in the poster. Key targets are people in their late teens, twenty-somethings and in their early thirties. "We're trying to establish a seatbelt summer approach," she said. "We went for outdoor because we want to bombard the motorist with the message."

There is, she maintains, continuity between the bloody television advertisement and the "Clicked Yet?" poster in that both feature the NSC's "No Seat Belt, No Excuse" line. The aim is to convince the 43 per cent of motorists who don't wear seat-belts to do so. Our seat-belt wearing rates lag far behind many of our European neighbours and should be as high as 85 per cent.

While the poster doesn't go as bald-headed for the sex-sells approach as the radio advertisement, it looks as though at one stage it might have gone a lot further. A not-so-close look at the poster shows that the women's bikini tops were airbrushed on.

The promotional campaign includes promotions on several radio stations. Companies, with large numbers of young employees, as well as nightclubs and pubs, have also been requested to display and distribute seatbelt posters and stickers.

Although whether any hip young person in the target market will understand the non seat-belt meaning of "Clicked Yet?" remains to be seen.