Getting tough guys to play it safe
MA Executive Office of Public Safety and Security
The Challenge
Seat belts save lives. But only if you wear them.
For several years, as the agency of record for the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, we’ve been tasked with developing television, digital, and out-of-home campaigns for safe driving efforts, including those designed to increase seat belt use.
While our work has been effective, we knew that EOPSS was ready to shake things up with out-of-the-box thinking – especially for our toughest audience: blue collar workers who drive delivery vans and pickup trucks.
Services Provided:
- Social/Cause Marketing
- Advertising
- Video/Photography
- Experiential
- Communications
- Digital
- Branding
When we turned drivers into brand ambassadors, their trucks became moving billboards that traveled across the state.
The Solution
Turning the audience into the messengers
So in May 2018, we posed an interesting question: what if we engaged our target audience to actually deliver the buckle up message? From this simple question, we developed a non-traditional experiential statewide campaign leveraging the vehicles that are driven by our target audience. By turning truck drivers into our brand ambassadors, their trucks became moving billboards that traveled across the state in our target areas of Springfield, North Shore, Taunton/Fall River, and Boston.
The campaign, which kicked off right before Mother’s Day, focused on the messaging “Love Your Mom/Buckle Up” based on our research that showed that our target audience tended to buckle their seatbelts when a female loved one was in the car with them, like their girlfriend or mom.
By engaging with more than 300 drivers, we were able to place vinyl decals on 207 trucks in our target geographic areas. There was an overwhelmingly positive response from drivers who were eager to share this message and support this cause, with many of them noting that they planned to keep the vinyl on their trucks even past the engagement. Each truck driver was contracted to keep the vinyl on for at least two weeks. In that two-week period, the average truck traveled an impressive 980 miles, which means our message traveled a total of approximately 200,000 miles in just two weeks.
The Results
Lives saved. Literally.
Most important have been the results of this hands-on effort. We were thrilled to learn that the preliminary results of the statewide seat belt survey saw an 8% increase in seat belt use across the state of Massachusetts, specifically in our target audience.
In 2019, we extended the campaign by partnering with private and public fleet owners to put “Love Clicks: Buckle Up” stickers on nearly 500 vehicles across the Commonwealth. Watch the explainer below for another take on the “Love your mom” story.
We’ve worked with EOPSS on many other campaigns over the years, including the one below, which celebrated the people who get us home safe when we’re impaired.
With recreational marijuana becoming legal in Massachusetts, EOPSS wanted a campaign aimed at people who drive high. We thought the best way to approach it was to let the audience speak for itself. See the video below.
