TV road safety ads are about more than just shocking viewers - they use a deep psychological strategy to get their message across too, David Labanyiis told
There is a swift grab for the remote control in many homes when a road safety ad begins.
Few want to watch bodies being crushed and lives irrevocably changed after a serious crash. For many, the thought is too shocking, and too close.
Behind these adverts is Belfast-based Lyle Bailie International, which has designed all TV road safety ads shown in the Republic for more than 10 years. The company says the adverts are about more than just shocking viewers.
"There is a deep psychological strategy behind this," says chief executive David Lyle. "We are encoding people's long-term emotional memory with a sense of the awfulness of what can happen. We do this to influence decision making. Viewers will associate the act of drinking and driving or not wearing seat belts with taking you to a terrible place."
That said, he agrees the ads are shocking and do prompt many people to switch over. However, this does not mean people are avoiding the advert. Quite the contrary, it is a sign of their success. Millward Brown researched reactions to an advert about seat belt wearing which shows the damage an unrestrained body can cause in a crash. They found 50 per cent of people switched channels when the ad began. However, only 3 per cent of these said they were unaware of and uninfluenced by the message. "So when someone flicks it is because they have seen the ad and we have already succeeded in convincing them. They are designed to have a fairly immediate impact."
A small number of complaints have been made about the adverts mainly from distressed relatives of someone killed in a crash. "They'll often say 'I don't want to watch it again but if it saves someone going through the pain I've gone through' . . ."
The adverts are heavily reliant on visual narrative - advertising jargon for letting the pictures tell the story. In part this is because a high proportion of the 17 to 49-year-old male target audience have poor literacy skills.
To reach this group, advertisers try to buy slots around men's favourite programmes: sport and movies.
Road safety adverts must compete with contrary messages - such as car ads highlighting speed or power as a selling point, or drinks companies. They are also trying to contradict films that glamorise dangerous driving.
Last year €4.5 million - a combination of RSA funding and sponsorship - was spent buying road safety media advertising. The Road Safety Authority (RSA) has to buy slots at normal commercial rates and, as Mr Lyle admits: "We don't have a massive budget."
To put this in context, compared to the volume of car and alcohol advertising on TV, road safety ads account for less than 10 per cent. Some unnamed drinks brands have even refused to be in the same break as drink and driving road-safety adverts.
"Many drinks brands have behaved impeccably. On the other hand some have attempted to ensure their ad is not in the same break as ours," says Mr Lyle, who declines to name the brands involved.
Similar to any advertising agency, Lyle Bailie has access to sophisticated viewer data which allows it to target particular age groups and genders. "If we are running a speeding ad, we will more tightly direct our buying at 17 to 24-year-old males. We also target people who influence that group, such as parents or girlfriends. We want families to talk about it."
The design of a new ad starts with research and psychology - Lyle Bailie has an in-house psychologist. "We look at the collision statistics to find out which target audience we need to reach. We look at data in five- and 10-year periods because one year is not long enough to base trends on."
Designing a road safety advertisement can take up to six months and cost up to €650,000. An important part of the process is testing it on focus groups of different age, gender and background. Relatives of crash victims are included in this process.
Lyle Bailie is currently working on a new speeding ad and hopes to develop an internet version. The web is increasingly seen as a more effective way of targeting the younger, male audience. However, one area of continuing frustration is it has so far proved impossible to develop road safety ads or messages for mobile phones. "The problem is that no one can guarantee the recipient will receive the message when they are not driving or crossing the road. You can imagine the horror if someone got a road safety message while driving, pressed the button illegally and crashed," Mr Lyle says.
The aim of an advert is not to just to raise awareness. "That is not enough. Awareness is an immensely important first step but the ad had to do much more. It has to shift attitudes," he says.
He uses the example of not wearing a seat belt. "The prevalent attitude was that wearing or not wearing a seat belt was personal choice. We needed to shift that so that people saw not wearing a seat belt was very selfish because of the damage you could do to someone else."
But do the adverts work? To measure the effectiveness of the ads, Millward Brown conducts tracking research on road safety adverts. These regularly show road safety adverts at the top of the list of "most influential factors in saving lives on Irish roads", ahead of new laws and Garda enforcement.
However, with road deaths rising again last year and drink-driving and speeding showing little signs of abating, is their effectiveness overstated? "No," claims Mr Lyle. He is conscious that people may wish to provide "socially desirable" responses to researchers. But this is, he says, "consistent with the advertising helping to create a climate of opinion in which road safety is viewed as highly important, worthy [ and] socially desirable".
To support this view, he points to another Millward Brown study in mid-2004 which asked people whether they were influenced by a range of "worthy" public service ads, from binge drinking to smoking cessation. Road safety ads occupied the top seven places.
Mr Lyle offers further support for the effectiveness of road safety adverts by saying that had the fatality rate matched the rapid rise in licensed vehicles: "We would have 722 deaths per year. The two - education and enforcement - have to work together. When advertising is working in harmony with enforcement you get the best outcome."
Case studies for RSA adverts have won a number of awards, including a European effectiveness award in Brussels. However, judges declined to show the seat-belt advert, saying it was too shocking.
This ad has been adapted for use in Israel, while Israel and Austria have paid to use other RSA ads.
AUSTRALIA
The Transport Accident Commission (TAC) was handed responsibility for road safety in Victoria in late 1989. Since then Victoria's road toll has been almost halved.
The TAC uses advertising campaigns with strong emotional content to educate about the dangers and consequences of drink-driving, speeding and fatigue. TAC ads convey the message in direct terms using phrases such as: "If You Drink, Then Drive, You're a Bloody Idiot."
Research indicates clear links between TAC campaigns supporting the speed and alcohol enforcement and reductions in casualty crashes.
The estimated benefits in terms of reduced insurance payments were respectively 3.9 and 7.9 times the costs of advertising supporting the speed and alcohol enforcement programs.
BRITAIN
Road Safety campaigns in Britain are restricted by advertising laws. Ads cannot, for example show a person being disabled as a result of a crash. There is also evidence that viewers "screen out messages that exceed their own tolerance levels", according to a spokeswoman for the Department of Transport. However, she said shock-style ads had a strong impact.
The anti-drink driving campaign in Britain is now 30 years old and has made the practice socially unacceptable, the spokeswoman said. Deaths from drink-driving have fallen by roughly two-thirds each year. In 2005 around 560 people died in crashes where drink was a factor. The spokeswoman said that the advertising sought a balance between "educative" and distressing campaigns. "We use the approach that we think will work best for the particular campaign," she said.
The THINK! road safety campaigns had an £18.14 million (€27.7 million) budget between 2005 to 2006.