Clemenger BBDO Wellington

Client: NZ Transport Agency
Product: Road Safety
Title: Belted Survivors
Media: Digital, Outdoor, Print, PR
Country: New Zealand
Date Of Campaign: 14-02-19

Background: Live hard. Crash harder. Staunch young males make up the majority of NZ’s unrestrained crash fatalities. They reckon seatbelts are for kids, the elderly, the weak. It’s an unnecessary accessory that dents their manhood. 40% would’ve survived if they’d been belted up. Their perception of seatbelts needed to shift from a sign of weakness to a tool for survival. Seatbelts needed to be rebranded with a new image: a tougher one. But this rebellious, rule-breaking, anti-establishment audience would switch off at the first hint of safety messaging. They won’t listen to a government PSA. But they do listen to and respect their peers. To connect with them, it had to come from our target audience themselves.

Idea: Our audience love sharing gnarly shit. So graphic imagery was used for good. Real crash survivors proudly wore their seatbelt wounds as badges of honour; confronting marks of survival that proved there’s nothing soft about seatbelts. Belted Survivors gave our audience powerful proof they couldn’t deny, delivered over social by peers who’d lived through a crash themselves. Using the real survivors of crashes to authentically deliver our message for us, and transforming crash ‘victims’ into powerful advocates of strength, survival, and of making the right call. Who then encouraged thousands more survivors like them to share their own tales of survival, too. Using the influence of real survivors around the world to encourage their own mates to make a good call like them – and for the first time, making the positive impact a seatbelt can make personally relevant to our audience.

Results: With over half a billion impressions worldwide, Belted Survivors has resonated back where our hard-to-reach audience is centred, in provincial New Zealand. Recall of Belted Survivors is nearly 3x higher amongst young males than the general population. And nearly 4x higher than previous seatbelt campaign recall. For an audience who usually skip or keep scrolling, Belted Survivors saw a 540% increase in audience engagement, compared to NZ Government standards for social marketing to this audience. The campaign also inspired a long-term initiative with the NZ Police, with survivors partnering in the development of workshops focused on seatbelt safety. Their stories have inspired hundreds of others to share their own tale of survival at beltedsurvivors.nz, and to share images of their own seatbelt marks over social. Every comment and image adding more proof to the undeniable impact seatbelts can make – and helping lead to a 74% perception shift for our audience.