Posted: July 5th, 2015

Case Studies: Developed Countries

3 Case Studies: Developed Countries

In evaluating the effectiveness of road safety publicity campaigns, Wundersitz, Hutchinson, and Woolley (2010) identify a number of principles integral to the conduct of such campaigns. These include: the conduct of formative research on the audiences at which the messages would be targeted, the use of theoretical models as the basis upon which the campaign’s concept can be underpinned, segmentation of the target audience into meaningful subgroups using key demographic variables, designing the message in ways which are relevant to the target audience, use of media channels which are frequented or patronized by the audience, and the evaluation of campaign effectiveness.

Referencing this framework, the case studies below consider four different road safety publicity campaigns in the UK, Sweden, and Australia (one each in New South Wales and Victoria). It is on this basis that the effectiveness of the “Salamaty” and “Enough” campaigns in Saudi Arabia is considered.

3.1 New South Wales: “No One Thinks Big of You” / the Pinkie Campaign

The Pinkie campaign is one of the most memorable road safety campaigns to have been carried out in New South Wales. It was carried out during June 2007, and involved the use of the wiggly little finger gesture to ridicule Australian boy racers and shame them into compliance with road safety rules.

Prior to the establishment of the NSW Centre for Roads Safety in 2011, the road safety agenda in New South Wales was vested in the now restructured Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA). The RTA had been set-up in 1989 with a brief of maintaining road networks in New South Wales. The RTA was also responsible for driver licensing and motor vehicle registration, for the funding of the upgrading and maintenance of local and regional roads through the local councils in place in the relevant cities or regions. Additionally, road safety campaigning was among its top priorities. Since the RTA’s inception, a number of road safety advertising campaigns have been carried out. These include, among many others, the following:

The “Speeding. No One Thinks Big of You (Pinkie)” campaign
The “Microsleep and Circadian Rhythms” campaign
“The Brain” campaign
The “Dragon’s Teeth” campaign
The “Look Out for Yourself” campaign
The “Clip Every Trip” campaign
The “Paranoia” campaign

This section will focus on the Pinkie^{^[1]} campaign, carried out in New South Wales, Australia, from June 2007.

3.1.1 Reasons for the Choice of the Pinkie Campaign

A range of factors informed the choice of the Pinkie campaign as a case study for evaluating potential responses to road safety awareness strategies in Saudi Arabia. In the context of road accidents, Saudi Arabia and the New South Wales share many similarities. In both jurisdictions, speeding is the major cause of fatal car crashes. Significantly, the speeding problem in both countries is driven by a “boy racer” mentality whereby speeding is viewed as a means of not only achieving recognition and approval but also of asserting or demonstrating one’s power or manhood. (Lumsden, 2013; Yusuf, 2012; Moore, 2008) Additionally, in both Saudi Arabia and New South Wales, this attitude is predominantly entrenched among young males. That New South Wales, through the Pinkie campaign, has been able to effectively challenge this attitude provides instructive lessons on how Saudi Arabia might also use a culturally relevant symbol to depict disapproval and contempt for the boy racer attitude and thereby use shame to compel youthful Saudi males with the speeding habit to conform to the desired social norms. Since the two jurisdictions face a common problem driven by common factors, the success of the Pinkie campaign in New South Wales implies that (cultural factors notwithstanding) the adoption of an identical campaign in Saudi Arabia might meet with similar success.

Resorting to Hofstede’s framework of national cultures, Saudi Arabia has been associated with a large power distance, high collectivism, and high uncertainty avoidance. In contrast, Australian culture has been associated with a small power distance, high individualism, and low uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 1997). These points of difference across the two cultures suggests that what works for one culture might not work for another. To illustrate using an example of just one of these cultural dimensions, Carey and Sarma (2011) find a positive correlation between authoritarianism and the proximal defence mechanisms of terror management theory. With the cultural differences between the Saudi Australians in mind, the conclusion is that the use of shock tactics in road safety campaign messages may work fairly well within the Australian context but not for the Saudi context. However, given that the car cultures of both Saudi and Australian youth are similar to the extent that dangerous driving among the male youth reflects the boy-racer attitude, points of convergence between the two may allow for the use of a similar strategy when the message is targeted to this demographic group. This underpins the relevance of studying the Pinkie campaign in relation to Saudi Arabia’s speeding problem.

3.1.2 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the Pinkie Campaign

The major causes of fatal road crashes in Australia have been identified as: drink driving, speeding, fatigue, loss of concentration, and reluctance to wear seatbelts (AAA, 2012). On its own, speeding is a causative factor in at least four out of every ten road-crashes that occur in New South Wales (AEW, 2011).

By age, the biggest casualties of road crashes are those falling within the 17 to 25-year-old age bracket. According to an RTA factsheet, 34 percent of all those involved in fatal road crashes that occurred in NSW between 2000 and 2006 were aged 17 to 25 years old (17 percent were aged between 17 and 20 while another 17 percent were aged between 21 and 25). Furthermore, according to the RTA (2010), four out of every ten violations of speed limits over 45 kilometres per hour are caused by P-platers[2], who predominantly belong to the 17 to 25-year-old age group. The RTA (2010) and Spinks (2010) further report that 85 percent of all the drivers who get caught up in fatal speed-related car crashes are men.

3.1.3 Message Design

Clemenger BBDO developed the creative concept of the Pinkie campaign. The message was designed to strike at the very foundation of the “boy-racer” ego. It asserted that, rather than being “cool”, those who speed in order to impress are in fact foolish and “appendage challenged” (AEW, 2011, p.1). The message was condensed into the slogan: “Speeding. No One Thinks Big Of You.” It revolved around a symbol – the pinkie (small finger) – used to challenge boy racers’ perceptions of themselves as cool, with the message being sent across in a youthful and informal manner.

During the development of the campaign, both the concept and message were tested for suitability and effectiveness. This was achieved through the use of focus groups comprising males aged between 17 and 25 (who represented the target audience) and of older females aged between 30 and 50 (who represented the general public) (RTA factsheet).

The advertisements were 45 seconds long, and used three analogous stories involving young men. The first shot of the commercial involved a slow moving vehicle pulling to a halt in front of a red traffic light, which is beside a pub. Two pretty girls, whose ages are approximately the same as those of the two young men in the vehicle, stand outside the pub. As the girls exchange flirting looks with the young men, a romantic soundtrack fades in and the lights change to green. Sensing an opportunity to prove himself, the young male driver takes off in a burst of energy and speed. Pleased at his performance, he smiles, but the girls exchange disapproving glances and disparagingly flash the pinkie symbol (Spinks, 2010).

The second shot involves a professional woman stepping onto a pedestrian crossing. She is forced to momentarily retreat as an oncoming car driven by a young male denies her the right of way. The close-up shot shows the young male’s sneer, obviously pleased at his show of power and control, while the lady (together with another senior lady in a bus close by) display expressions of disapproval and exasperation. The senior lady then flashes the pinkie (Spinks, 2010).

The last shot involves four young men, driving a P-plated vehicle. In slow motion, they are captured negotiating a bend close to the pub shown in the first shot. The driver turns the car around the corner so sharply that the vehicle throws the passengers to one side, and then follows the turn with several impressive skids before bringing the car back to its normal course. Pleased with himself—and clearly relieved that he has completed the manoeuvre successfully—the driver smiles and looks through the rear mirror for signs of approval from his recovering passengers. Instead, he catches furtive pinkies being flashed by the male occupants in the backseat (Spinks, 2010).

3.1.4 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the Pinkie Campaign Messages

Prior to the creation, execution, and delivery of the Pinkie campaign, road safety publicity campaigns in New South Wales (and indeed in most of Australia) had made predominant use of the fear appeal. Those that did not make use of the fear appeal used shock tactics in order to send the message across.

This overuse of shock tactics (manifested through images of twisted metal and blood) and the fear appeal had led to a numbing effect which, in line with Shklovsky’s habitualization theory, deadened the perceptions of most audiences making them all but immune to the ideas or images contained in subsequent road safety advertisements (Shklovsky, 1925). Such advertisements became stale, or lost their sting, and most of the members of the target audience could simply not recall them.

As Shklovsky’s theory states, this habitualization of the human mind can be addressed through defamiliarisation techniques, whereby the ordinary is ‘repackaged’ in such a way that habitualized patterns of perception are disrupted. In the Pinkie campaign, we see a successful attempt to break this habitualization through the use of slow motion, visual metaphor and symbolism, and a deliberate avoidance of the all too familiar shock tactics appeal to fears (Shklovsky, 1925). Though the use of this approach by the designers of the Pinkie campaign may not have been a conscious engagement (there is no evidence to show that the designers of the Pinkie campaign deliberately chose this model), the presence of defamiliarisation techniques nonetheless helped the Pinkie campaign thus made a clean break with the extended parallel process model that had been the main conceptual theory underpinning campaign creation and execution (Witte, 1992, 1998).

The Extended Parallel Processing Model (EPPM) (Witte, 1992) builds on the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) (Rogers, 1983). It consists of two components: the danger control process (which leads to the acceptance of the message) and the fear control process (which leads to the rejection of the message) (Witte, 1992). Threat appeals contain both components of threat (the severity of the threat, and the susceptibility of the individual to that threat) and those of efficacy (self-efficacy and response efficacy). When the target of the message is presented with the fear appeal, the individual will proceed to evaluate the threat embedded in the message (Witte, 1992).

If the individual perceives the threat he faces to be moderate or high, fear is triggered and the individual proceeds to the next stage of the evaluation process, which basically involves evaluating the efficacy of the alternative presented in the message. If the individual further evaluates the perceived efficacy to be high, the danger control process is triggered, and the individual begins thinking of how to prevent or forestall the imminent danger. In this respect, the individual responds to the danger, and not to his fears, and this response is referred to as an adaptive outcome. But when the threat is perceived as moderate or high and the efficacy as low, the fear control process is triggered instead. The individual responds to his fears and not to the danger, and this is referred to as a maladaptive response. One such response is to deny the threat. If, on the other hand, the individual evaluates the threat to be low, he will not proceed to the next stage of the evaluation process and therefore will not respond to the fear. Witte demonstrates threat and efficacy evaluation to be a function of various factors, including the individual’s culture and personality, so that the same fear appeal is likely to produce different results among different people (Witte, 1992). While the EPPM could quite clearly be applied to earlier campaign messages this is not obviously the case in the Pinkie campaign. But the EPPM still merits

the use of the pinkie finger became the most powerful and enduring symbol of the campaign. In many cultures, the phallus is viewed as a symbol of natural generative power, and men with small phalluses are perceived as “not men enough.” In a figurative sense, individuals who are ‘not men enough’ usually attempt to compensate for their shortcomings or weaknesses by undertaking certain, usually aggressive, activities as a way of covering their shortcomings in the eyes of others (Dunne, 2003). This is what has been referred technically to as the “Napoleon Complex” or informally as the “short man syndrome”, and is a good example of the Freudian concept of the ego defence mechanism where an individual behaves aggressively as a way of overcompensating for a real or perceived weakness he has (Julien & Simiu, 1995). That is, those engaging in dangerous driving behaviour manifest the Lacanian hole known as the ‘beance’—dangerous driving habits constituting conscious manifestations to fill this hole. Accordingly, the pinkie symbol acts as a phallic signifier, superintended by the Symbolic Order (or Freudian’s paternal superego) to suppress the instinctual desire among these individuals to speed or engage in other dangerous driving behaviour (Julien & Simiu, 1995). Using Freudian terminology, it may also be explained as the manifestation of reaction formation, resulting from libidinal shortages caused by the overuse of their libido at one of the five stages of an individual’s development (they are, the oral, anal, phallic, latency, or genital stages) (Julien & Simiu, 1995). It is, in this sense, that most people understand the action of wiggling a pinkie finger at somebody (Spinks, 2010). By using the symbol of the pinkie to deride the actions of the boy racers as equivalent to the compensatory actions of men who are not men enough, the campaign effectively exploits a symbol and concept well understood in Australian culture (Spinks, 2010).

The pinkie symbol, as “Cultural differences” (2012) illustrates, is culture-specific and therefore has different connotations in different parts of the world. For example, it is used to denote a thin person or thing in South America, a loose woman in Japan, or a bad thing in Indonesia. In France, it is used by one person to warn another against trying to make a fool out of the person using it. In Saudi Arabia, as well as in the Mediterranean, it carries a similar connotation as it does in Australia: it is understood as referring to a small penis (“Cultural differences”, 2012). However, given cultural—and particularly religious—differences between KSA and Australia, it is unlikely that such a campaign would be received in the same way that it was received in New South Wales.

symbol not only derives its power from its uniqueness (which leaves no room for ambiguity or equivocation), but its use renders the use of words unnecessary, and thus frees the producer to reinforce the process of defamiliarisation by using other approaches such as camera, editing techniques, and a non-diegetic soundtrack that collectively inject the requisite emotional and psychological cues (what Aristotle, in his theory of rhetoric, calls pathos) into the message. At the same time, it allows the advertisement to transmit its message (using language appropriate to the youth subculture), without necessarily being sexually explicit and therefore offensive to some viewers (Spinks, 2010). And, in case the viewer is not familiar with the pinkie symbol, the advertisement is redolent with cues (for example: the raised eyebrows, smirks, and looks of aggravation among those supposed to be impressed by the dangerous driving stunts) that enable such viewers to join the dots and achieve closure. All this, of course, enhances viewer engagement.

The use of metaphorical symbolism aside, it is possible to make out elements of the Theory of Planned Behaviour in the Pinkie campaign. Manifest in the psychology of the “boy racers” is the disparity between what they themselves consider to be the consequences of speed driving and the social normative beliefs regarding such behaviour held by people who belong to their reference groups and who can rightfully be considered their “significant others.” In this regard, the advertisement is a play on the constructs provided by the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TRB) (Ajzen, 1985). It does use shame to motivate an individual to exhibit behaviour consistent with social norms. It is needless to add that at the age of 17-25, the need to secure the approval of one’s peers is high, and such individuals would do anything to avoid being shamed in front of or by their peers.

Due to their age, the boy racers have neurological characteristics (e.g. excessive production of the hormone dopamine) which make them easily excitable, impulsive, rash, and willing to jump headlong into risky behaviour. In short, young men are full of rampant sexual energy and riotous hormones. The boy racers have also been brought up in a culture of video games, racing cars, and action movies that underscore the need for speed, and have consequently been cultured by the media to act thus. For them, speed is an act of positive reinforcement (Spinks, 2010; Lumsden: 2009, 2013). Therefore, targeting this audience with a rational appeal would not have worked.

While the pinkie symbol has emerged as the most enduring and powerful symbol of the advertisement, others also reinforce the advertisement’s core message. For example, the pub is shown in two scenes: an indirect allusion to the role of alcohol. By introducing what has become a somewhat iconic gesture (the pinkie-finger sign) together with some simple but effective language (`no one thinks big of you’) and close-up shots of faces expressing disapproval and contempt (refer to Figure 3.1 below), for dangerous drivers these campaigns went beyond merely seeking to change attitudes. They created an overall scheme of representation designed to empower members of the community in the `how to’ (gesture, expression, language) vis-à-vis confidently dealing with the dangerous drivers they might encounter. The practical effect was to arm the target audience with a set of gestures and expressions they could use when encountering reckless road use behaviour. In practice, the campaign produced millions of confident carriers of an unequivocal message: reckless driving is socially unacceptable, and an activity for fools.

Finally, as with the UK and Victoria campaigns, we see a concerted and deliberate effort to bring everybody on-board in the design and execution of the message, including the boy racers and the general public.

Figure 3.1: The Pinkie Campaign. Source: Grabbed from the “No One Thinks Big of You” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqWO7fzwSLM).

3.1.5 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

With speed being the major contributory factor to fatal road crashes in New South Wales, it was necessary that publicity campaigns targeting speeding be formulated. Audience segmentation was done based on psychographic and demographic (mainly age) variables, on the basis of which the “boy-racer” category was identified as an extremely high-risk group. Those falling within this category were profiled as youthful males (specifically, those aged between 17 and 25 years), and were motivated to engage in speeding as a way of impressing others. Thus, the campaign was targeted at this group.

3.1.6 Choice of Media Channels

The 17 to 24 year-olds are major consumers of TV, cinema, and the Internet. In this regard, these three media channels were used to deliver the Pinkie message. TV and cinema were used between 2007 and 2009, and afterwards, the campaign was sustained by means of roadside billboards. The print media was also used to deliver the Pinkie message.

3.1.7 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

Among others, the effectiveness of the Pinkie campaign has been evaluated by the TNS Social Research group. Their first evaluation of the campaign’s effectiveness was carried out nine weeks after the campaign had been placed in the media (RTA Factsheet). The evaluation assessed awareness of the message, its recognition, changes in behaviour, perceptions about it, and assessments as to how well it mobilised drivers into action. The evaluation established that (RTA Factsheet):

The campaign had high awareness levels, with a recall rate of 67 percent among the young males targeted and 77 percent among the general public.
The campaign also had high recognition rates with message recognition rates for young males at 71 percent and for the general public at 72 percent. Correspondingly, the recognition of the meaning of the ad stood at 54 percent for young males and at 59 percent for the general population.
It triggered extensive debate and discussion on the issue of speeding among 60 percent of young males and 55 percent of the general public. The campaign was also associated with a change in driving behaviour among 62 percent of the young males and 54 percent of the general population. It also led to consciousness about individual driving behaviour among 60 percent of the young males and 50 percent of the general population.
As far as perceptions about the campaign were concerned, the evaluation by TNS Social Research demonstrated that 70 percent of the general public believed the ad to have been effective in prompting drivers to adhere to speed limits, as opposed to 70 percent of the young males who also believed so. About 61 percent of the general public believed the ad would be effective in influencing young drivers to stick to the speed limits while only 58 percent of the young males thought it would be effective in influencing young drivers to stick to the speed limits.

Apart from the TNS evaluation, another evaluation about the effectiveness of the Pinkie campaign showed that 53 percent of all young males and a similar percentage of the general public were motivated by the Pinkie campaign to comment about somebody else’s driving (NSW Government, 2010). The evaluation also showed that 64 percent of the general public, and 63 percent of young males believed that the Pinkie campaign would be effective in influencing young male drivers to stick within speed limits. The study also found that the message recognition for the Pinkie campaign stood at 74 percent for the general public and at 75 percent for young males (NSW Government, 2010).

Finally, a further review of the effectiveness of the Pinkie campaign was carried out by Watsford (2008). His evaluation involved the administration of pre-test and post-test surveys (before the campaign was aired and after it was aired). In his study, Watsford (2008) reports that the Pinkie campaign achieved high awareness levels, which he put at 97 percent for the young males targeted and at 95 percent for the general public. Further, 78 percent of all the respondents self-reported their intentions of encouraging the young males aged 17-25 to adhere to speed limits. As a result of the campaign, Watsford (2008) found that there was an overall 32 percent decline in speed fatalities in New South Wales, a 30 percent decline in young driver fatalities and a 45 percent decline in speed-related fatalities for young drivers.

Critics suggest that the figures adduced by the three evaluation studies carried out on the effectiveness of the Pinkie campaign tumble too much on the ‘positive side’ to be realistic, an assessment that may be attributed to a combination of contemporaneous initiatives and methodological weaknesses of the evaluative studies. For example, most of the evaluations rely on self-reported data, which is inherently biased due to self-reference criteria. In spite of this heavy reliance, the researchers make no attempt to evaluate the quality of the data using empirical measures such as the Cronbach’s alpha. These evaluation studies also measure the effectiveness of the campaigns using crash data, which, as Smith (2004) demonstrates, can be misleading due to issues such as underreporting, the timescale, or many other factors. Indeed, for a campaign to be deemed effective or otherwise, the time interval must be long enough in order for the time-dependent effects to be identified. Consequently, using crash or fatality statistics may be suitable for long-term campaigns lasting up to five or ten years, but not for short ones. In the short ones, the use of crash statistics only may be appropriate (Smith, 2004). Moreover, Stead et al. (2006) also assert that campaign effectiveness is time-dependent, and tends to dissipate as the duration increases, typically after one or several months. Factors such as weather conditions, which can affect driving, were not factored into account. Besides the propensity of many individuals to misrepresent themselves leading to high levels of bias in self-reported data, Maycock, Lester, and Lockwood (1996) demonstrate that a large number of individuals tend to forget that they ever were involved in an accident of some sort. The overall implication, therefore, is that while the Pinkie campaign was indubitably successful, the evaluation studies carried out to gauge its effectiveness may have overstated the impact.

3.2 Victoria: “Everybody Hurts When You Speed”

3.2.1 Introduction

Road safety in Victoria is in the purview of the Victorian Transport Accident Commission (TAC). Ever since the TAC embarked upon its road safety program towards the end of the 80s, it has made many gains. For one, the beginning of the program marked a paradigm shift in the conduct of Victorian road safety campaigns from a hit-or-miss affair into a systematic exercise. This was accompanied by increased funding for the Victorian Transport Accident Commission (which however did not translate into increased funding for road safety campaigns as illustrated in the next paragraphs), better quality road safety advertisements, enhanced public visibility of the body, and an elevated profile as a support partner in road safety enforcement activities (Delaney, Lough, Whelan & Cameron, 2004).

Although funding was increased, closer scrutiny of TAC’s income and expenditure shows that most of the outlay was devoted to the settlement of claims. For example, Table 3.1 shows a Comparative Analysis of TAC’s Income and Expenditure for the years 2002 and 2012:

Table 3.1: Comparative Assessment of TAC’s Expenditures – 2002 and 2012

REVENUE
2002					2012
Description		Amount			Description		Amount
Net premium revenue		813,927			Net premium revenue		1,382,662

EXPENSES
Description	Amount		Percentage	Description		Amount		Percentage
Gross claims incurred	(694,733)		84.3%	Gross claims incurred		(2,851,932)		89.5
Administration costs	(76,823)		9.3%	Administration costs		(146,254)		4.6%
Accident prevention programs	(23,080)		2.8%	Marketing and road safety expenditure		(48,931)		1.5%
Trauma projects funding	(8,686)		1.1%	Trauma projects expenditure		(11,426)		0.4%
Premium collection fees	(16,751)		2.0%	Premium collection fees		(33,829)		1.06%
Investment fees and expenses	(4,435)		0.5%	Safer road infrastructure expenditure		(94,481)		3.0%
TOTAL OPERATING EXPENSES	(824,508)			TOTAL OPERATING EXPENSES		(3,186,853)

Source: TAC: 2002, p.30; 2012, p.20.

As table 3.1 demonstrates, there has been an increase in the authority’s income, with net premium revenue rising between 2002 and 2012. The largest share of the authority’s expenses is accounted for by accident claims, which rose from 84.3 percent of the total expense outlay in 2002 to 89.5 percent in 2012. In contrast, expenses related to road safety campaign messages witnessed a decline from 2.8% of the total expense outlay in 2002 to just 1.5 percent in 2012. Administration costs declined over the same period, but expenditure on safer road infrastructure increased. The implication is that in devoting most of its resources to settling claims arising from road safety accidents rather than towards the prevention of such accidents, TAC largely remains a reactive rather than a proactive organisation.

Road safety publicity or advertising campaigns remain a central mechanism through which the TAC aims to achieve its mandate of ensuring safety roads in Victoria. Some of the major campaigns it has carried out since its initial advertising campaign in 1989 include (Delaney et al., 2004; AAA, 2012):

“If you drink and drive, you’re a bloody idiot” (1989, 1993, and 1998).

The focus of the road safety campaign for Victoria will be on the “Everybody Hurts”[4] campaign that was carried out in July 2010.

3.2.2 Reason for the Choice of the “Everybody Hurts” Campaign

The Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) suggests that individual actions are not just the product of the individual’s intentions, but are also a function of social normative beliefs. In that regard, the role of the group in individual decision-making and behaviour is greatly elevated and it behoves campaign planners to also appeal to the group if they hope to influence individual behaviour. The success of the “Everybody Hurts” campaign in Victoria, which underscored the emotional hurt groups suffer as a result of an individual’s action, underpins this argument. Since few (if any) advertising campaigns in Saudi Arabia have pitched their speeding messages on the effects of speed-related crashes on groups, the “Everybody Hurts” campaign provides an alternative approach that the Kingdom might adopt in its quest to reduce speed-related crashes. The “Everybody Hurts” campaign is thus a textbook study on how the impact of a car crash can hurt the groups to which the individual belongs, and provides numerous lessons on how such a campaign may be structured—thus underpinning its credentials as a relevant case for study especially for a country like Saudi Arabia where speed-related crashes are depressingly numerous.

3.2.3 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the “Everybody Hurts” Campaign

The major causes of road accidents in Victoria include speeding, drink-driving, failure to wear seatbelts, fatigue, and loss of concentration. Of these, speeding has been identified as the major cause of car crashes on Victorian roads. On its own, speeding is a factor in at least three out of every ten road crashes in Victoria and is the number one killer on Victorian roads. It is estimated that between 2008 and 2010, at least 121 drivers and 46 passengers perished in speed-related crashes (TAC, 2010; AAA, 2012). According to AAA (2012), the vast proportion of accidents involves males rather than females, with 2.66 more males being killed in road accidents than females. By age, the largest percentage of road-crash casualties fall within the 18 to 25-year age bracket. Using 2003 statistics, 20 percent of the deaths involved those aged 60 years and above, while only 6.5 percent were children below the age of 14.

Based on the statistics (above) showing that speed is a major contributor of road crashes in Australia (as outlined above), with a view to probing attitudes towards speed further research was conducted by Sweeney Research on behalf of TAC. This field research (TAC, 2002) established that:

Low level speeding, defined as a few kilometres of speed above the legally enacted speed limit (typically 5k/h) was prevalent in Victoria roads, and across all age groups; this in spite of the fact that eight out of every ten residents of Victoria shared in the belief that speed was a major cause of road crashes. Seven out of ten drivers admitted to speeding “some time” (TAC, 2010).
The majority of the drivers exceeded the speed limit by less than 9 km/h, with most of them converging on the 5 km/h point (TAC, 2010).
The majority of the drivers believed that anything less than 10 k/h over the speed limit did not qualify as speeding and was not dangerous (TAC, 2010).

These findings were combined with other similar research findings (Sweeney Research, 2010):

The risk of a driver getting involved in a car crash increases significantly as speed increases. More specifically, every 5km/h increase in speed when the driver is doing at least 60 km/h doubles the probability that he or she will be involved in a car crash.
A reduction of just 5km/h in average travelling speed would result into a 15 percent decline in casualty crashes.
Travelling at 10km/h above the speed limits exposes the driver to more than a 100 percent chance of being involved in a casualty crash. Travelling at 20km/h over the speed limit means that the driver is six times as likely to be involved in a casualty crash as a driver doing the legal speed.

Based on this data from crash statistic data, traffic offence reports, and further field research from research firms such as Sweeney Research, the advertising campaign concept was created and the “Everybody Hurts” message executed.

the “Everybody Hurts” campaign was that road crashes cause trauma affecting not just the people directly involved in the accident but also the lives of other people. These may include the parents, close family members, friends, passengers, workmates, police officers, eyewitnesses, girlfriends, siblings, and other members of the affected individual’s group. Road accidents do not just ruin the lives of the drivers, but also those of the people close to them (TAC, 2010). This is an approach that has also been taken by the ‘Doctor Brian Owler, Don’t Rush’ campaign in New South Wales. Like Everybody Hurts, Don’t Rush features testimonials of the friends, family members, and members of the community affected by traffic accidents. They all conclude by stating, “I wish I wasn’t in this ad” (Squires, 2012, p.1).

The creation of the advertisement involved the conduct of live interviews for the friends and family members of 19 year-old Luke Robinson, who died in a car crash. This resulted in 26 testimonials on the dangers of speeding, which were then aired (TAC, 2010). The 26 affected members explain how Luke’s death affected them. Luke Robinson was speeding along Anakie Road in Lovely Banks in the early hours of the morning when his car lost control and crashed, killing him and injuring his three passengers (one of them seriously). The accident occurred on March 28, 2010 (TAC, 2010; Everybody Hurts, 2012).

The campaign starts off with an advertisement in the press, which outlines Luke’s story and why his family would like to be part of efforts to reduce speeding. This is followed by 16 stories aired on television over a fortnight. Concurrently, an online brief directed visitors to the “Everybody Hurts” website, where the 26 stories are narrated. In the process, the visitors to the site are encouraged to comment on the stories and to also forward videos. These stories were later on put together to produce a three-minute mega commercial that was formally launched and then aired on TV on July 25, 2010 (Duncan, 2011).

3.2.5 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the “Everybody Hurts” Campaign Messages

Where the UK campaign exploits the life-long emotional consequences likely to affect those who cause speed-related crashes, the “Everybody hurts when you speed” campaign exploits the concept of emotional contagion to illustrate the ripple effect that speed-related car crashes have (Sigal, 2002). Thus, while the former focuses on the emotional consequences such crashes visit upon one person (the protagonist), the other focuses on the emotional scars such accidents leave not just on the protagonist and main antagonist, but also on the many – the victim, his family, friends, community, workmates, passengers, and so on.

The theoretical fulcrum upon which the “Everybody Hurts” campaign revolves in is the concept of emotional contagion (Sigal, 2002). By dint of the fact that car crash victims are members of groups, they both expose and are exposed to the emotions of fellow group members. In line with the Circumplex Model of Affect (Russell, 1980), where the emotional contagion is viewed as being bi-dimensional and dependent on the strength of the valence and activation levels, the “Everybody Hurts” campaign cleverly plays upon the trick of valence and activation level enhancement with an eye on reaping as maximum an impact as possible. This is achieved through the use of strong attentional processes—what Campaign Brief (2012, p.1)—has described as “raw emotions”: for example, grieving facial expressions and body language. In this regard, the facial expressions also act as effective and affective semiotics signalling group danger. As such, the use of the Aristotelian concept of pathos as a technique of persuasion is clearly discernible.

Among others, Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson (1997) and Rozin and Royzman (2001) show that stimuli exhibiting high levels of negative valence typically elicit more rapid and stronger emotional, cognitive, and behavioural reactions than do neutral or positive ones. In terms of the “Everybody Hurts” campaign, the use of grief makes a major statement about the efficacy of emotional contagion. Studies by Kemper (1984), Raush (1965), and Bartel and Saavedra (2000) demonstrate that states of unpleasant affect (grief, in this case) tend towards self-perpetuation, and rapid escalation once triggered, and in the process “create an opportunity for both automatic mimicry and social comparison to occur” (Rosekrans, 1967, p. 311). It is little wonder, then, that as the initial press advertisement gave way to the first 16 stories to be aired on national TV for a fortnight (and then to an online brief that redirected the audience to the “Everybody Hurts” microsite, eventually paving the way for the 26 stories that would form the core of the commercial with Jack, the victim, at the centre of the ripple), there was emotional contagion characterised by an outpouring of grief for the victim’s family and a strong negative valence towards speeding. A Facebook application, to which the users of the “Everybody Hurts” microsite were then directed, had friends of each visitor located to the application randomly displayed, thus making associations between Jack’s story and the visitor’s and providing a high degree of personal relevance to each individual. In providing for an opportunity for the individual to forward his/her videos or comments, the campaign facilitated the process of social comparison and thus reinforced the message. It may also be argued that in the process, the technique of priming helped in the acceptance of the message—especially given that the final three-minute commercial was fashioned later on from these stories and the target audience was sounded on their views. Not only that, apart from influencing the negative valence towards speeding, the emotional contagion, in triggering the transmission of information of a socially affective nature between members of the affected groups, succeeded in becoming a primary source of information for the assessment of group behaviour and attitudes towards speed driving.

Figure 3.2, below, illustrates the ripple effect. Note how the ripple cascades from the centre—initially affecting close members such as “brother, mother, and father”—before enveloping other members as its fans outwards.

Figure 3.2: The ripple effect.

Source: Everybody Hurts website: http://www.everybodyhurts.com.au/

To the extent that the “Everybody Hurts” campaign tied the emotional consequences of speed-related crashes on the group to the outcome of an individual’s speeding behaviour, it wittingly or unconsciously portrayed the use of the basic principles of Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour (1985) — predicated on the assumption that behaviour is based on emotional assessment of consequences, perceived behavioural control, individual intentions, and social normative beliefs. Therefore, by avoiding speeding (a negative action) as a way of achieving positive outcomes (happiness for the group), the “Everybody Hurts” campaign also locates its conceptual basis within the health belief model (Rosenstock, 1974). This also reflects Skinner’s Theory of Operant Conditioning, where the emotional hurt to the group resulting from traffic accidents acts as a ‘punisher’, triggering negative reinforcement with the aim of enforcing both ‘escape’ and ‘avoidance’ learning (Skinner, 1938, 1948).

It is not only the pathos element of Aristotle’s persuasion theory that the campaign exploits in order to elicit favourable reactions towards the speeding message. In allowing the 26 people directly affected by the death of Luke Robinson to give their testimonials, the “Everybody Hurts” campaign also exploits the ethos element of Aristotle’s work. Here, the credibility of the speakers is projected on the basis that they are the ones closest to Jack and most directly affected by his death and therefore the most qualified to speak about the emotional consequences on the group. As such, these individuals become the source models of the campaign’s communication and, due to the low elaboration, persuasion is achieved via Kelman’s (1961)

with mediation theories (McLuhan, 1994; Ritzer, 2007; Gramsci, 1937; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973), in the use of novel forms of communication such as digital media (more precisely social networking sites such as Facebook and the internet), the “Everybody Hurts” campaign does more than “mediate” or transmit information. It acknowledges the dominance of digital media (more particularly the internet) in the construction of knowledge for the young, hard-to-reach, and technologically savvy target groups. These groups would not have been reached otherwise. It also “mediates” or arbitrates between the “boy racer” attitudes espoused by the youthful segments and the desired behavioural outcomes, and links nodal points in the road safety awareness network for the production or performance of reality. To that extent, it significantly enhances the delivery, reception, and acceptance of the speeding message within the youthful segments of the target audience, explaining its runaway success in influencing attitudes and behaviour towards the speeding problem.

3.2.6 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

In view of the fact that young people (and especially those aged between 18 and 25) are the highest risk group for speed related crashes in Victoria, and in view of the fact that the main person around whom the advertisement revolves was only 19 years old at the time of his speed-related death; it was only appropriate that the “Everybody Hurts” campaign be targeted at young people in Victoria.

3.2.7 Choice of Media Channels

The choice of the internet-mediated digital media (the dedicated website of “Everybody Hurts”, the Facebook application, and online advertising) was appropriate to the extent that the young people who were a key target audience of the campaign are hard to reach, technologically savvy, and heavy users of the Internet. Apart from its role of information transmission with a view of attitudinal change towards the speeding problem, the Internet (unlike other media platforms) provides an opportunity for instantaneous feedback, which allows the audience to forward their comments to the campaign executors. Additionally, in introducing the Facebook application where every user’s friends are randomly displayed on the landing page, it also personalized the message making it highly relevant from a personal point of view, something which mass media is not capable of (Duncan, 2011).

The press (newspapers, especially) played a supporting role. Apart from the creation of the initial awareness about Luke’s death and his family’s desire to use their loss as an instructive lesson for young drivers not to speed, it created awareness about the impending three minute TV commercial thus directing the audience to their television screen (Duncan, 2011). Apart from its mass appeal, television enables the transmission of visual elements that are important components of the art of persuasion since in this case; some visual and non-verbal signals were used to enhance the valence and activation levels of the emotion contagion. Outdoor billboards appeal to the driver at the place where accidents are most likely to take place – the roadside, with radio also playing an instrumental role due to its wide mass appeal and ability to convey crucial audio elements of the message.

3.2.8 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

Overall, the TAC campaigns appear to have met with significant success on Victorian roads. According to the TAC 2011 Annual Report, notwithstanding the fact that road users have increased by more than twice since TAC was formed in 1987, the number of road crash fatalities in Victoria had dropped by more than 50 percent by 2010. While 705 people died on Victorian roads in 1989, by 2010 the number stood at only 288, the lowest since 1952. The progress made in reducing road deaths in Victoria is depicted below:

Source: TAC, Annual Report (2011, p.19).

Reverting back to the specific impact of the “Everybody Hurts when you Speed” campaign, very few evaluation studies have been carried out to assess the impact of the campaign. The few that have, however, indicate broadly positive preliminary impacts for the campaign.

According to Campaign Brief (2012), prompted recall rates for the “Everybody Hurts” advertisement did not only stand at an unprecedented 83 percent, the advertisement also went on to win the silver medal at the Cannes and Platinum Awards. According to Campaign Brief (2012, p.1), the advertisement “generated more than A$1.5 million worth of earned media …and had a demonstrable, quantifiable impact on self-recorded speeding and contributed to a record low annual toll.” It is logical to expect that as more substantive assessment studies on the impact of the “Everybody Hurts” campaign are completed, the preliminary findings will be supported. So far, no empirical studies have followed up on these preliminary findings.

3.3 UK: “Live with It” Campaign

3.3.1 Introduction

The drive towards the achievement of accident-free roads in the UK is encapsulated in the UK government’s road safety blueprint titled “Tomorrow’s Roads: Safer for everyone.” Unveiled in 2000, the blueprint sought to achieve a reduction in road accident fatalities and injuries in the UK by 40 percent within ten years. To achieve this goal, a mix of engineering, enforcement, and education strategies was adopted—of which the “Think!” road safety publicity campaigns are part (DfT, 2012a).

The major objective of the “Think!” campaigns is to persuade drivers, passengers, and pedestrians that road accidents are caused by the small things they do and having done that, to persuade them to undertake attitudinal and behavioural changes which will either minimize or altogether eliminate the risk of such crashes. The priorities of the “Think!” campaigns are set by the UK Department of Transport, in collaboration with a number of other stakeholders (Angle, Greggs & Goddard, 2009).

Since the “Think!” campaigns started in 2000, at least 16 publicity campaigns have been run. Some of these campaigns include the following:

The “Think! Slow Down” campaign of June 2001
The “Badjobs.uk.com” campaign of July 2001
The “Think! Wear a seatbelt …You don’t get a second chance” campaign of September 2003
The “Night Out” and “Rights” campaign of November 2003
The “Crash” campaign of June 2004
The “Its 30 for a reason” campaign of September 2005
The child car seats campaign of September 2006
The “Moment of doubt” campaign of July 2007
The “Julie” campaign of 2007
The rural speed campaign of September 2007
The “Three Strikes” campaign of November 2008
The “kill your speed or live with it” campaign of February 2009
The January 2010 “Country roads: don’t risk it”

The focus of this case study is on the £3.2 million “Live with It”[5] Campaign, which was carried out in February 2009 (Dunt, 2009).

3.3.2 Reason for the Choice of the “Live with It” Campaign”

Where the Pinkie campaign uses shame to force compliance to the speeding message, the “Live with it” campaign in the UK uses guilt to achieve the same purpose. Such a strategy has not been used in Saudi Arabia before. Its successful use in the UK provides an opportunity for Saudi Arabian road safety campaign developers to learn what made the campaign work. This would help them apply the lessons learnt to similar campaigns in Saudi Arabia. It provides a reference point on how the universal experience of guilt might be used to persuade Saudi Arabia drivers to observe speed limits.

3.3.3 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the “Think!” Campaigns

Road crash statistics and traffic offence reports compiled by the DfT (2012b) showed that speeding is one of the major causes of road crashes alongside drink driving and the failure to wear seatbelts (DfT, 2012b). With regards to speed, it was estimated that more than 4,180 people succumbed to death or serious injuries due to road crashes where speed was a contributory cause. As a matter of fact, it was also found that driving at 30mph predisposes the driver or his passengers to four times less risk of death as opposed to driving at 40mph (DfT, 2012b).

Consequently, speeding has been identified as a major behaviour or problem that road safety campaigns in the UK should target. Shedding light on attitudes towards speeding are research studies carried out by the BMRB Social Research (2006) three years before the conception and execution of the “kill your speed or live with it” campaign. They showed that:

Acceptance of speed limits was especially low among drivers aged between 16 and 29 years and those over 55 years. It was also low among male drivers, drivers who had no children, and those in the ABC1 social-economic group. These were the most prone to drive over speed limits and to reject the legal speed limits.[6]
While 70 percent of all drivers agreed with the maximum speed limit of 30mph in residential areas, most of them believed that driving at a few miles per hour over that speed limit in a 30mph speed zone was still safe and acceptable. Therefore, there was a need to reinforce the message that driving a few miles just above the 30mph speed limit is unacceptable and dangerous.
While emotional consequences of speeding seemed to exert the most influence on women’s attitudes towards speeding, for men the main influencing factors were road conditions and other traffic.
Unlike those in the ABC1 socio-economic class, individuals in the C2DE socio-economic class were more accepting of speed limits and less likely to engage in speeding. Younger people, who were also more prone to speeding, believed that keeping up with the traffic was more important than sticking to the speed limit.
About 76 percent of all men and 61 percent of all women were likely to drive. Around 80 percent of those aged between 30 and 54 years were also likely to drive, compared to 46 percent of those falling in the 15-29 age bracket and 69 percent of those in the over 55 age group. About 83 percent of those belonging to the AB[7] socioeconomic groups were also likely to drive, compared to 70 percent of those in the C1C2[8] group, 57 percent of those in the D[9] socioeconomic group and 34 percent of those in the E[10]

This data— together with the traffic offence reports and road crash statistics— offered a rich backdrop against which the audience segmentation and targeting, message design, choice of media channels, and evaluation of campaign effectiveness for the “Kill Your Speed or Live With It” campaign was conducted.

3.3.4 Message Design

In line with the data showing that speeding is one of the major causes of road crashes in the UK, the “Live with It” campaign was themed around the speeding message. In particular, it emphasizes the life-long psychological trauma of living with the emotional consequences of a road crash. The TV commercial shows a man being haunted by images of a child he had killed through a road crash caused by speeding over a 30mph road. The images follow him in the bathroom, in the bus as he travels, and in the park with his son, in sleep, as he watches a football match…everywhere. In the radio ad, chilling messages from the other world, where children voices narrate the man’s torment, are also disquieting. In order to encourage the audience to stop speeding, it thus projects the guilt that the drivers who cause accidents are likely to feel. These haunting voices and images reflect the Jungian concept of archetypes, where the unconscious aspects of the man’s mind “gather associational material” and thus become visible and able to be consciously realised (Lawson, 2008, p. 38). The specific archetype here is the ghost, or the dead children killed in road accidents who don’t know that they are spirits and who desire to come back to life and to achieve conscious expression and realisation. This ghost archetype recurs in a motif-like fashion, varying from spirit voices to spirit images, but always following a basic and consistent pattern, and ends up causing psychological distress to the man.

3.3.5 The Use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the “Live with It” Campaign

The prevalence of the “availability heuristic” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) among UK road users has long been acknowledged (Angle, Greggs & Goddard, 2009). This availability heuristic forms part of the Jungian archetypal images resident in each individual (under certain circumstances) and which can terrify the individual. According to Tversky and Kahneman (1973), rather than make evaluative judgments based on the complete set of information, people make judgments based on what their minds can easily recall, and proceed to assess the probability and magnitude of an event on the basis of that assessment. The prevailing images of fatal car crashes in the minds of the road users are those involving high-impact collisions by vehicles driving at top speed, and backed by the everyday experience of these drivers moving at 5mph over the limit without incident, associative connections between this level of speed and safety have long been established and reinforced through repetition that it is difficult to convince the road users that a speed of just 5mph over the limit can lead to a fatal crash. As the findings of the BMRB Social Research (2006) indicate, even though most drivers agree with the 30mph speed limit, seven out of every ten believe that driving just a few miles per hour (5mph) over this limit is neither dangerous nor unsafe.

Road safety advertisements have long sought to fight this availability heuristic through attempts to project the true likelihood and frequency of speed-related crashes (for example, “a speed of just five kilometres per hour above the speed limit doubles the risk of crashing”) with only minimal impact on recall rates. Examples of previous campaigns modelled along these lines include the “It’s 30 for a reason” and the “three strikes” campaign. Additionally, as illustrated by Angle, Greggs, and Goddard (2009), the attitudes of a significant majority of road users in the UK towards car crashes continue to err on the side of Lewis, Watson, and Tay’s (2007) “third person effect” – “it cannot happen to me.”

The success of the “Live with It” campaign derives from the fact that its creative approach marked a departure from the traditional strategy of fighting the availability heuristic, and instead resorted to the use of surprise to excite the road users’ limbic system and to the use of consequentiality to trigger reticular formation. In using this approach, it was successful in achieving a very high degree of mental recall, as attested to in the post-evaluation surveys where most members of the target audience (51 percent of them) acknowledged that it is highly memorable. In the use of vivid encounters between the main actor of the plot and images of children from the underworld killed through the protagonist’s reckless speeding, it effectively creates what Damasio (1999, p. 35) refers to as a “flashbulb memory” which makes the message not only personally meaningful and relevant to the viewer, but also outré and engaging.

In doing so, the “Live with it” campaign acknowledges emerging strains of thought from neuroscience and social psychology literature which assert that emotion – rather than reasoned action – is the major antecedent of behaviour, as theorized by among others, Beattie (2008) and du Pleiss (2005). In this new strain of thought, the individual’s rationalisation is merely a “post hoc justification” for the action already taken, and therefore the aim of the advertisement should be to target the emotional process behind the action rather than the rational justification for the action – which this advertisement effectively achieves (Beattie, 2008; du Pleiss, 2005).

In this regard, the creative formulation of the “Live with It” campaign is laced with very heavy undertones of Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) (1985), and turns the major claims of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) credited to Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) on their head. Consequently, in forcefully bringing home to the viewers the life-long emotional consequences of speed-related road crashes, the “Live with It” advertisement makes primary use of emotive appeals, with the generic message of “don’t speed!” only being inferred; and invites future executors of creative concepts in the field to consider the significance of “biases, heuristics, and automated behaviour” in influencing action. Moreover, it acknowledges the automaticity of behaviour (Bargh & Morsella, 2008) and its occurrence below the conscious level (Elliott, 2011), and seeks to influence it from there. Taking the perspective that in spite of the fact that the emotional process is wholly rational, and in spite of its subjective expression, Damasio (1999) points to the fact that the truth (vis-à-vis effectiveness) most likely lies between the use of the rational and emotional appeals.

d images – the haunting image of the dead child lying on the road under the protagonist’s bed for example – helps to capture and hold viewer attention, while somatic markers – the reinforcement of the harmful emotional consequences associated with car crashes – motivate the road users to avoid speeding. Whereas previous advertisements made and reinforced associations between speeding and the risk of death and injury, “Live with It” attempts to create new associations between speeding and a life-long guilty conscience. That noted, however, it must also be acknowledged that while most of us identify with being haunted, repeated exposure to haunting images will also desensitise the mind in much the same way as repeated exposure to road carnage images does.

In the execution of the “Live with it” campaign, the major underpinnings of Frith’s (2007) brain empathy circuit can also be discerned. According to Frith (2007), the physical encounter of pain by individuals triggers certain areas of the brain to light up. The same mental process occurs within individuals who have been exposed to the experience of observing others suffer pain. In the latter case, the lighting up of the observer’s brain is due to his mental experience of the other person’s pain. Therefore, by inviting the viewers to vicariously experience the pain that the advertisement’s protagonist has had to go through in dealing with the life-long consequences of the speed-related crash the “Live with It” campaign has been effective in creating empathy in the target audience and prompting them to act in the desired manner.

With a rich history stretching all the way from 1963 when the first road safety advertising campaign in the UK was crafted and run, the speeding message had been hammered home to the audience many times over, until one could – with good reason – surmise that the audience had become tired of and therefore no longer responsive to that message. Such a situation calls for, in the remarkable language of Viktor Shklovsky’s theory, the use of ‘defamiliarisation’ techniques in order to disrupt the habitualized perception of the target audience and deliver the message anew.

Whether through design or otherwise, the crafting of the ‘Live with It” campaign betrays the use of at least two defamiliarisation techniques which, to coin a phrase, ‘steal back’ the human mind from the cognitively stale and familiar and disrupt normalised and customary modes of perception (Miall, 2002,). These include the use of flashbacks and hyper reality. As far as the latter goes, the dramatic use of hyper-reality in the haunting image of a dead child popping up everywhere and in the surreal voices of dead children rising from the underworld to torment their killer is a recurrent motif weaved powerfully into the plot with dramatic effect and the desired consequence (DfT, 2012a). A snapshot of this scene grabbed from the TV commercial is presented in figure 3.3 below (note the image of the dead child in the near background, obviously visible through the mirror the man is looking into as he brushes his teeth, and the man’s distressed look):

Figure 3.3: Live With It.

Source: Dunt (2009)

In figure 3.3 above, the boy lying on the bed is the boy who was killed in the road accident caused by the man brushing his teeth. His appearance is thus a reflection of the Jungian archetype where the dead boy’s spirit has gathered “associational material” and is now being consciously realised. The man sees the dead boy sprung to life through a mirror – symbolic also because in Lacan’s theory the individual achieves mastery of self through perceiving himself as the ideal ego (the mirror stage) (Lawson, 2008, p. 39).

In an attempt to reduce cognitive effort, especially under conditions of high uncertainty, most consumers deploy the use of heuristics in their decision-making processes and therefore the perceptive marketer will deign to use heuristics as a weapon to influence the target audience to achieve their desired states (Cialdini, 2001; Fennis and Stroebe, 2010). Some examples of these heuristics include liking, authority, and social proof. In the attachment of the guilt feeling to the campaign’s message and image, “Live with It” offers a powerful alternative to that of cognitive evaluation, and in so doing offers the viewer the heuristic of “choosing by liking” (Frederick, 2005). Indeed, in a post-test survey of the advertisement campaign carried out by BMRB Social Research, 16 percent of all the respondents surveyed were categorical that they “liked” the ad notwithstanding its shock factor (Angle, Greggs & Goddard, 2009).

As in many parts of the world, gender disparities in attitudes towards speeding are evident in the UK. Pre-test research studies carried out by BMRB Social Research evince that male drivers in the UK are more likely to drive above the speed limit than female drivers. Compared to women, more men hold the belief that driving over the speed limit is neither dangerous nor unacceptable, and fewer still make constant checks to their speedometers as they drive (Angle, Greggs & Goddard, 2009). Moreover, more females than males are comfortable with the speed limits, and more of them express the belief that there is a valid reason for the 30mph speed limit. More men than women believe that in the residential areas, the 30mph limit is too slow, and that one’s speed should be “determined by other traffic than by the speed limit” (Angle, Greggs & Goddard, 2009, p.19). These disparities are important predictors of the response of the two different demographic groups to road safety advertisement campaigns. According to Lewis, Watson, and Tay (2007), male reaction to certain speed messages is different from that of females, with the “third-person effect” predominantly entrenched among male reaction to road safety advertising messages.

Elliott (2011) has cited neurological studies that – with some relevance to campaign concept creation and execution – detail the psychological underpinnings of male vis-à-vis female behaviour. Deploying the use of functional MRI, the studies assert that the prospects of reward trigger different reactions between the genders: in men, the prospect activates the ventral striatum (a region in the brain which is concerned with motivation) while in women the prospect activates the amygdala-hippocampal region (a region of the brain where emotional reactions revolve).

The depiction of stressful experiences in a road safety advertisement will thus trigger different responses to the message among people of different genders. In men, the stressful experience will trigger an increase in the flow of blood to the “left orbitofrontal cortex” and activate the fight-or-flight response. In females, the stressful experience will activate the limbic system and trigger an emotional response (Elliott, 2011).

In avoiding the use of high-octane and vivid scenes of road carnage (splattered blood, twisted metal, anguished screams, and mutilated bodies), “Live with It” deftly navigates between the female emotional response (which it effectively secures) and the male fight-or-flight response (which it effectively avoids). Indeed, post-test surveys of the campaign show that 62 percent of all males agree with the emotional consequence message of the campaign (Angle, Greggs & Goddard, 2009).

Affective responses such as fear have increasingly become a focal point of interest to cognitive and behavioural neuroscientists, spawning the relatively new discipline of affective neuroscience, whose aim is to interrogate how such responses are produced in the brain (Berridge, 2004). An example of a concept within this new discipline is that of “neuropeptide coding of motivation”, which follows the pattern of the now-discredited dedicated brain neurons and centres, in proposing that specific motivations are produced by specific “physical substrates” which reside in the brain (Berridge, 2004, p. 203). By isolating the specific neuropeptide that triggers specific motivations or responses, specific actions can be targeted at those specific motivations. A famous example is that of the neuropeptide Y, or the hunger neuropeptide. This suggests that there is a specific brain centre that drives dangerous driving behaviour and which may be isolated and targeted, using specific messages. The hierarchy concept, which asserts that “the forebrain can usefully be posited to initiate appetitive motivated behaviour by a hierarchical mechanism, whereas the brainstem executes consummatory aspects of motivated behaviour”, may also find application in road safety campaign execution as this area of study evolves from its nascent stage (Berridge, 2004, p. 204).

3.3.6 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

Based on the data from crash statistics, traffic offence reports, and attitudinal field research by the BMRB Social Research, the effective profiling and targeting of the message in the “Live with It” campaign was achieved by first profiling, then targeting either or both of the following two groups:

Those who don’t accept the speed limits, but consider keeping up with traffic and road conditions rather than speed limits should determine one’s driving speed. Those belonging to this group have the highest risks of being involved in speed-related car crashes. Based on the data and using demographic variables, the typical car crash victim would be profiled as: male, aged between 16 and 29 (or over 55), without children, and belonging to the ABC1 socio-economic group.
Those who accept the speed limits but are convinced that driving just a few miles faster above the speed limit is not dangerous. These cut across the whole gamut of gender, socio-economic, and age groups. As such, this would involve a mass appeal rather than a targeted appeal as in the first case.

Targeting the second group would be more effective given that this group is potentially larger than the first one (seven out of ten of all drivers), and no less at risk than the first one. According to the DfT (2012b), driving at 30mph predisposes the driver or his passengers to four times less risk of death as opposed to driving at 40mph. According to Dunt (2009, p.1), “if you hit a child at 30mph there’s an 80 percent chance they will live but if you hit them at 40mph there’s an 80 percent chance they will die”. This satisfies the ‘sizeability’ criteria of effective audience segmentation and targeting. Besides, targeting the first group only would raise fundamental issues of accessibility and homogeneity, which would compound attempts at an effective message at these specific individuals.

Moreover, based on the statistics, targeting only men would leave out the 61 percent of women who drive, 80 percent of those aged between 30 and 54 who drive, 83 percent of the drivers who belong to the AB socio-economic group, 70 percent of those in the C1C2, 57 percent of those in the D and 34 percent of those in the E socio-economic classes. All these have significant pockets of those who believe that driving just a few miles above the speed limit is both safe and acceptable, and are therefore also exposed to speed-related crashes. Targeting the mass market would also deliver the message to the first group, in addition to the second one. Consequently, rather than target a small segment of the audience, the “Live with It” campaign targeted the mass audience.

3.3.7 Choice of Media Channels

The question of which audience to target is inseparably connected with the choice of medium to be used for the message. This is evident in the execution of “Live with It.” Since the advertisement was targeted at the mass audience, the aim was to reach as many people as possible with the message. To the extent that television, as a mass audience channel, was used in this campaign, the choice of media channels for this advertisement can be considered to have been appropriate. Additionally, the effectiveness of “Live with It” depended on the ability to deliver the emotional consequences of speed-related crashes—which, in turn, hinged on the use of strong visual elements. To the extent that television facilitated this, the choice of this media for this campaign can also be considered to have been effective.

Apart from the use of television, the advertising campaign message was also disseminated through the Internet. The Internet is considered appropriate within this context because one of the key subgroups within the larger audience is the 16 to 29 year-old cohort, which is also one of the groups at high risk from speed-related car crashes. Since this group is hard to reach, has a high propensity to consume digital media, and is technologically savvy, the choice of the Internet (YouTube) as one of the main channels for disseminating the emotional consequences message of “Live with It” was also highly appropriate. Other media used to support these two channels include cinema (due also to its visual appeal), radio (due to its mass appeal), and indoor posters.

3.3.8 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

The effectiveness of the “Live with It” campaign has been evaluated by many researchers, among them are Angle, Greggs and Goddard (2009), who report on the BMRB survey carried out on the campaign in April 2009. The post-test survey involved a total of 1, 944 respondents (1,308 of who were drivers), with the interviews being conducted at homes and with the aid of “Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI).” The respondents were aged over 15 years, and were selected through random sampling procedures. The survey sought to evaluate the impact of the “Live with It” campaign on the target audience’s attitudes towards speeding, awareness and recognition of the campaign’s message, attitudes towards the “Live with It” campaign’s message and goals, and how well the campaign’s message was communicated. The evaluation showed that:

After 500 TVRs, unaided recall of the ‘Live with It” campaign stood at above 20 percent. However, recall rates stood at an impressive 78 percent when using prompts.

3.4 UK: “Live with It” Campaign

3.4.1 Introduction

Endeavours aimed at improving road safety in Sweden have been crystallized into the Vision Zero program, which was approved and passed by the Swedish parliament in 1997. This program brings together traffic law enforcers, road users, providers, and other stakeholders into a collective effort geared towards the formulation of performance targets. The ultimate aim is to completely eradicate deaths on Swedish roads. This vision of attaining zero deaths on Swedish roads is to be attained incrementally. At the time of its adoption in 1996, Sweden’s Vision Zero sought to reduce road fatalities by 50 percent by 2007.

Today, Sweden has a very low car crash incidence, and is considered as having the safest roads in the world. For example, in 2009, it reported only 39 deaths per every 1 million of its population, down from 62 just eight years earlier (Avenoso, 2010). According to Dorsin (2011), only 270 people lost their lives on Swedish roads in 2011. Notwithstanding this, and in a desire to achieve zero fatalities from road accidents, Sweden has continued to undertake road safety campaigns. As explained in its Vision Zero strategy, critical to the achievement of Sweden’s road safety goals is the conception and execution of road safety publicity and advertising campaigns aimed at persuading road users to change their attitudes and behaviour with regards to the major sticking problems which include speeding and drink driving, among others.

In a review of all the advertising campaigns carried out in Sweden before and after the formulation of the Vision Zero strategy, Truls et al. (21009) write that the most ambitious and national of these campaigns were run in the 70s and 80s, and that campaigns which have been run afterwards have largely been local (targeting one or more cities) or regional (targeting one or two counties). While speeding and drink driving have been the most common thematic areas addressed by the campaigns, other equally prominent themes to emerge from the review by Truls et al. (2009) include: the importance of wearing seatbelts or safety kits such as helmets and child car seats, the need to ensure adherence to general traffic safety measures, and the need to show consideration for other road users. These messages have predominantly been transmitted via television commercials, newspaper and magazine advertisements, leaflets, and billboards.

Some of the advertisement campaigns carried out in Sweden include: “No Extra Life”; “Traffic lights, are they necessary?”; “Would you dare to Encounter Yourself?”; “Vägverket “Coola Killen” (which is translated as “Swedish Road Administration ‘Cool Guy’ ”). The focus of this section is on the “No Extra Life[11]” road safety advertising campaign, whose creative concept was created by Henrik Henrik Films on behalf of the MHF (motorists against drinking and driving), a non-governmental organisation with interest in enhancing the road safety of Sweden in general and Stockholm in particular. The creative concept for the “No Extra Life” campaign was completed in late 2011, upon which the advertisement went live.

3.4.2 Reasons for the Choice of the “No Extra Life” Campaign

Although drink driving is a problem in Sweden but not in Saudi Arabia, the fact that the “No Extra Life’ campaign in Sweden was targeted at the youth makes it a relevant case study for Saudi Arabia, where the youth are at highest risk from car crash fatalities. The strategy of reaching out to the youth in their own terms (by for example using media devoid of adult pointers and leveraging on a fad that is popular with them) provides instructive lessons which can be incorporated into road safety advertising campaigns targeted at the youth in such a way that the message will find a willing audience as well as high levels of acceptability with this group.

3.4.3 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the Campaign

According to Larsson (2006), the behaviour behind road accidents in Sweden includes drink driving, speeding, and seatbelt usage. Of these three, the most serious is speeding. This is due to the fact that Sweden has high-class roads but very low levels of traffic density, which provides a fertile ground for drivers to violate speed limits. Drivers observe high degrees of sobriety (that is, very few drink drive), and the rate of seatbelt use is also very high. Notwithstanding this, Sweden could still do better in these areas. According to Larsson, “A total compliance with speed limits, seat belt laws and driver sobriety has been estimated to have the possibility to reduce the number of fatalities by almost 50 percent.” Even though high levels of sobriety when driving are generally observed, drink driving is a major problem for some age cohorts, and most especially the 16-24 year old age group.

3.4.4 Message Design

No Extra Life” is a 50 second TV commercial. The first scene of the advertisement opens with four youthful passengers – one female and four male – being driven in a red sedan by an equally youthful male. Clearly, all the occupants of the car are under the influence of alcohol and the car is speeding along a fairly narrow two-lane highway. It overtakes one car, and edges closer to a huge truck in the near horizon. Once again, the driver attempts to overtake the huge truck by pulling away into the next lane. However, there is another car coming from the opposite direction on that lane, which the driver had not seen. In an attempt to swerve away from that oncoming car and avoid the imminent accident, the car loses control, careens out of the road and hits a pole on the shoulders of the road, eventually overturning and getting mangled into a wreck. In the aftermath, nothing stirs. There is no movement, no scream, nothing. The only thing that moves is a swaying and blood-soaked pendant dangling near the driver’s seat. It is apparent that the car’s occupants have perished.

To the viewer’s palpable relief, however, the first scene zooms out into the second scene and the viewer realizes that the first scene was actually a screenshot from a gaming console. One can now see that the person behind the gaming console buttons is the man who had been behind the wheel in the first scene while the other four are cheering him on. We see cans of beer on the table, and get the impression that the youths are partying. Then the commercial ends with the words: “In Reality you don’t get an extra life.”

Figures 3.4 and 3.5: Snapshots of the “No Extra Life” Commercial.

Source: Grabbed from the “No Extra Life” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0NY9tfJtgA)

3.4.5 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the Campaign Messages

The beauty of sustained road safety advertising and publicity campaigns is that message repetition leads to reinforcement, and increases the possibility of greater action towards desired end states. The downside to that however is the consequential wear-out especially when the same creative approach is used over and over again. To defamiliarise the senses of the target audience from that habituated state, Shlovsky (1925) has suggested the use of several techniques, one of which is the metaphor. Contrary to Aristotle’s assertions, as part of a master trope, the use of the metaphor here is not merely as a stylistic device aimed to ornamentally endow the message but serves a much deeper purpose. It greatly aids in the extension of the core idea beyond the realm of the experience, abetting as it does the creation of meaning using the imagination, and thereby also derives the “No Extra Life” campaign’s persuasive punch.

The “No Extra Life” preys upon a wildly popular fad among Swedish youth – gaming – and makes connections between the car racing game and real life. In this rendering, the real life is the tenor, while the game is the vehicle (Foss, Foss & Trapp, 1985). Central to the comprehension of this metaphor is the grasp of the concept of “permadeath” which in the “lifeworlds” of the gamers refers to the permanent and irreversible death of a character in the game. Thanks to technological advances, gamers are able to restore their favourite characters to life whenever they get killed in action by simply reloading or restarting from the last “savepoint” (Bissell, 2010). This is evident in most games, including GTA Vice City and Final Fantasy VII, among others. As such, game characters have an extra life, even when they get killed in car racing action, and permadeath is only an illusory inconvenience in the gamers’ “lifeworlds” (Henderson, Eshet-Alkalai, and Klemes, 2008; Bissell, 2010).

The “No Extra Life” campaign sharply brings to the target audience the grim reality that no such extra life exists in the real life. Life is much more than a game – with no savepoints from which one’s life can be restored in the event of a fatal car crash. Permadeath is a fact of life that should sober one from unnecessarily risking his life through alcohol-induced dangerous driving stunts. In the four-pronged classification of metaphorical renderings by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), this qualifies as a structural metaphor, which to the credit of the “No Extra Life” framers accentuates the differences between the gamers’ “lifeworlds” and the real life in order to achieve as powerful an effect as possible (Fiske, 1982).

In line with Kaplan (1990), this metaphorical deployment also potentially provides the skeleton upon which the conceptual structure, grounding, relation, and definition of the youthful Swedish audiences can be fleshed, thereby enabling the development and categorisation of schema. By appealing to youth through media which they are most familiar with and probably addicted to, “No Extra Life” succeeds not in just reaching them with the message in the most effective way; it also divorces the message from adult pointers, which would otherwise have coloured the message and made it less acceptable and ineffective with this target group.

But the artistic rendering of the “No Extra Life” does not exclusively reside in the use of the metaphor as a technique of defamiliarisation. The construction of the advertisement’s pathos is also powerful, and contributes in a big way towards making the persuasive power of the “No Extra Life” campaign most compelling. The use of cut-out shots in the commercial not only offers the viewer visual relief, but also helps in the construction of meaning. For example, the cut-out shot of the speedometer lets the viewer know just how fast the car is moving over the speed limit. Like the cut-out shots, the alternating use of close-up, medium, and reverse angle shots—and the alternating of screenshots between the driver and some of the passengers—offers visual relief. Lighting, however, achieves much more than that. In some instances, low-key lighting is used, partially obscuring the faces of some of the passengers, a technique that is used to presage imminent danger, suspense, and worry as the car cruises towards the truck, pulls away from it straight into an oncoming car, and then swerves to avoid this oncoming car and ends up plunging into the shoulders of the road and into remarkable destruction. The use of extra bright lighting—especially in the second scene of the commercial—enhances the excitement and thrill and reinforces the partying atmosphere.

At the top left corner of the game screenshot are car icons, and above them the text “number of lives left.” These car icons progressively reduce as the car hurtles towards the inevitable crash and destruction, reflective of the use of powerful visual symbolism which dramatically enacts the positive correlation between drink driving and the risk of fatalities and connects the commercial’s images with its assigned meaning.

3.4.6 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

In line with the established fact that drink-driving is a major problem among young persons aged between 16 years and 24 years, the total audience was segmented by age, and the campaign targeted specifically at those falling within this age cohort.

3.4.7 Choice of Media Channels

As observed, the target audience that the “No Extra Life” campaign sought to reach was youth aged between 16 and 24. Typically, the members of this age cohort are hard to reach using conventional media channels. Given the fact that they are not only technologically savvy but are also heavy consumers of digital technology (including video games), the best channel through which they could be targeted would be through computer-mediated technologies such as the internet. This we see the campaign achieving through the use of video sharing sites such as YouTube. Additionally, the “No Extra Life” campaign was carried out via television. The relevance of the television as an appropriate channel derives not only from its mass appeal, but also from the fact that it offers a powerful visual appeal which is essential in bringing out the full message of the “No Extra Life” campaign (the message is predominantly expressed visually, with the only words, brief as they are, coming at the end of the advertisement). As such, it can be concluded that there was an appropriate selection of media for the campaign.

3.4.8 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

Evaluation studies on the impact of the “No Extra Life” road safety campaign are still in their seminal stages, and therefore, empirical conclusions on the campaign’s effectiveness are yet to be inferred. However, various anecdotal pointers exist so far that point to the campaign’s runaway success. One of this is its shortlisting for the premier Eurobest Film Awards that recognize and reward the best advertisements from Europe in various categories.

3.5 Conclusion

When complemented with other efforts, publicity/advertisements are an effective means of enhancing safety on the road (Elliott, 1989). Among the objectives which road safety campaigns aim to achieve include: raising heightened awareness about a driving problem or behaviour, prompting interpersonal influence by stimulating conversations within and between groups of road users, reinforcing the existing beliefs/attitudes or shaping the formation of new ones, enhancing the visibility of particular issues, and stimulating road users to undertake information search with regards to particular road safety issues.

The achievement of these objectives depends on how well the road safety advertisement is designed. A major requirement is that the campaign be organized scientifically. This is evident in all the four campaigns evaluated above, that is: the Pinkie campaign in New South Wales, “Live with It” in the UK, “Everybody Hurts” in Victoria, and “No Extra Life” in Sweden. All these campaigns are organized around problems identified from data collected through knowledge and attitude surveys, as well as from crash statistics and casualty data. Apart from being data-led, all the campaigns evince a strategic campaign planning process incorporating a consideration of the target audience, their motivations, and their behaviour—with message content and media selection being undertaken in light of the target audience’s profiles.

Apart from being scientifically formulated, these campaigns owe a large part of their success to their disruptive nature. In a world where people are bombarded with information to the point of saturation, road safety advertisements must be designed to stand out if they have to be effective. Not only that, the tendency for the target audiences to become desensitized to a message is high, especially when the same message is repeated over and over again, using the same old strategies and approaches. In the extended metaphor of the extra life extant in the gaming world, the concept of the emotional contagion, the symbolism of the pinkie finger, and the emotional lifelong burden that the haunted must live with; these four campaigns literally make a clean break with the time-worn approaches of previous campaigns and in so doing break the mould and compel the audiences to stand up and take notice of the road safety message. These are invaluable lessons that Saudi campaigns such as “Salamaty” and “Enough” would do well to learn from, if the road safety scourge on Saudi roads is to be addressed.

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Case Studies: Enough and Salamaty

Case Studies, Developing Country (Saudi Arabia)

1.0 Introduction

Saudi Arabia has long been considered as having one of the highest road accident rates in the world (Naeem, 2010). According to Al-Ghamdi (2000a), as rates of motorisation and road construction have increased in Saudi Arabia so too have the number of road accidents, fatalities, and injuries. For example, Al-Ghamdi (2000a) finds that between 1971 and 1994, the number of road accidents in Saudi Arabia had increased by 30 times, with the number of injuries rising six times and that of fatalities seven times over the same period. In 2004-2005, the number of deaths on the roads in Saudi Arabia reached over 4,000. Alarmingly, this increased to 6,458 in 2007-2008 (KSA Interior Ministry, 2009). Not only has the number of accidents increased, but also their serious nature is increasing. According to a 2009 report by the General Directorate of Traffic (KSA), during the year 2008-2009 there was a total of 484,805 traffic accidents resulting in 6,142 deaths (Arab News, 2010).

In a bid to arrest this situation, various road safety initiatives have been undertaken by multiple players, including government agencies such as the Ministry of Interior and Jeddah Traffic Management, and public organizations such as Aramco and Mobily. Some of these include road safety publicity campaigns such as Enough and Salamaty campaigns and the implementation of traffic management systems such as the “Saher System” (Naeem, 2010; News Network, 2010).

Since Enough, executed in 2006 and representing the first ever targeted road safety campaign in Saudi Arabia (Algamass, 2010), the number of road safety campaigns in Saudi Arabia remain relatively few, with the other such notable campaign being Salamaty, whose execution commenced in April 2010 (Public Security Directorate, 2010). Prior to Enough, all previous national advertising directed at broad security issues (terrorism, criminality) with traffic issues being only touched upon in this general context (Algammas, 2010). Consequently, this chapter will specifically focus on Enough and Salamaty. This chapter first evaluates Enough before turning its focus on Salamaty.

1.1 The Enough Campaign

The Enough campaign was carried out in 2006 and ran for 30 days, beginning at the end of April 2006 and concluded towards end of May and has been considered in various quarters as the first KSA campaign to explicitly focus on road safety, with all previous national advertising directed at broad security issues (terrorism, criminality) highlighting also traffic issues in the general context. By contrast, the aim of Enough campaign was to have a very specific and positive effect on road safety awareness (Algammas, 2010; Ministry of Interior, 2006; Public Security Directorate, 2010). Although Enough was targeted at the general population, there was also a discernible attempt, manifest in some elements of the campaign, to reach out to the younger segments of the audience—considered the highest risk group. Enough was adopted as the theme of the campaign, whose main objective was to create road safety awareness with a view to enhancing safety on the Kingdom’s roads. The campaign also sought to focus on traffic rule violation and speeding, which, as shown by the statistics adduced, are the major causes of road accidents in Saudi Arabia (Ministry of Interior, 2006).

1.1.1 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the Enough Campaign

Various behaviours have been identified as being behind the runaway rates of road accidents in Saudi Arabia. The major behaviours identified include: speeding, failure to adhere to traffic regulations (e.g. jumping red lights or making illegal turns), failure to wear seatbelts, and talking on the phone while driving (Al-Ghamdi, 2000; 2000b; 2002).

According to Al-Ghamdi (2000a), speeding is the major cause of road accidents in Saudi Arabia, accounting for 42 percent of all road accidents in the Kingdom. The other major cause is the violation of traffic rules. Together with speeding, these two factors account for up to seven out of every ten road crashes in Saudi Arabia. On its own, the violation of traffic rules is considered to be the cause of 25 percent of all the road accidents in Saudi Arabia (Al-Ghamdi, 2000a). Disregard for wearing seatbelts is also considered to be a contributory factor for road accidents in Saudi Arabia. Naeem (2010, p.3) writes that seatbelt-wearing rates in Saudi Arabia stand at “33 percent for drivers and 4 percent for front passengers” while Al-Ghamdi (2000a) puts the figure at much lower rates of 2 percent.

Various studies have also sought to evaluate the demographic profiles of those who are likely to be at the highest risk of road crashes. By age, Al-Ghamdi (2000a) concludes that those aged below 40 years are at the highest risk of either being killed or injured through road accidents. By nationality, Al-Ghamdi (2000a) finds that the significant population of foreigners in Saudi Arabia accounts for 44 percent of all accidents, in spite of the fact that they make up around 38 percent of the population. Moreover, Al-Ghamdi (2000a) also finds that married drivers are at higher risk than single or unmarried ones, while up to a fifth of all those involved in road accidents are uneducated or illiterate.

1.1.2 Message

As has been observed, Enough was the first road safety campaign in Saudi Arabia which was dedicated specifically for road safety purposes. In all the previous initiatives, the road safety message was embedded in other unrelated campaigns that focussed on issues such as terrorism or security matters. While the message in Enough was specifically dedicated to road safety issues, it was targeted at the general audience rather than customized for specific segments of the larger audience (Algammas, 2010).

Various messages were targeted at the audience over the course of the campaign. Most of them emphasised the consequences of poor driving behaviours. For example, “I lost my childhood due to disobeying traffic lights”; “I lost all my family due to recklessness”, “Economic losses… disabilities…deaths due to road accidents…”, “Twelve people die daily in KSA due to car accidents” and “One person dies every two hours because of road accidents” (Ministry of Interior, 2006).

Other messages used in the campaign included: “Enough speed…enough disobeying traffic lights…enough recklessness”, “Dad, Enough speeding”, ““Enough”, what every driver said after he was involved in a car accident”, ““Enough”, what the traffic regulations said”, and “”Enough” disregarding traffic rules” (Ministry of Interior, 2006).

One of the ways through which the messages were delivered was a TV commercial. The first scene of the TV commercial opens with the shot of a young girl of about ten years helping her father onto a wheelchair and wheeling him outside and into a park. At the park, she sees three girls playing and smiles at them in a wistful manner that suggests that she wishes she could play with them but cannot because she is now responsible for taking care of her father. The commercial ends with the message “Because of reckless driver I lost my mother, and my father became a handicap. Enough reckless driving.” A screenshot has been grabbed from this commercial and is presented as figure 1.1 below:

Figure 1.1: Screenshot from the Enough TV commercial. Note the playing children in the foreground in the park, with the young girl wheeling her father into the park in the background.

An assessment of the message strategy used in this campaign isolates at least ten messages over a 30 day period, delivered using diverse media and formats (for example, through TV and radio commercials, newspaper advertisements, brochures, and roadside signs). Some of the messages, even though driving towards a similar goal, were not mutually reinforcing. This brings out the possibility of not only confusing the audience with a disparate or incoherent message but also of information overload, with the possibility of blurring the real objectives of the campaign. Targeting a precise message to well-defined and distinct audiences could have been a better strategy leading to better results for Enough. The integrated marketing communication concept, where the different aspects of the communication are structured to work towards a unified goal (rather than each working in isolation) (Blakeman, 2007), could have been well used here to achieve the stated objectives of the Enough campaign.

Figure 1.2: “Enough Road Safety Campaign”

Courtesy: Directorate of Public Security

1.1.3 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the Campaign Messages

Redshaw (2011) has attributed driving behaviour to the social and cultural context in which it is learnt, which context is subject to the potent shaping influence of the media (which she views to play a significant role in framing driving experience in the same way it shapes other social aspects such as gender attitudes). As such, she asserts that “driving is a socially mediated practice and the framing of cars and driving is largely a social activity” (Redshaw, 2011, p.1).

In this regard, cars are viewed not just as objects without meaning, but symbols that come embedded with certain connotations, most of which derive from the type of car. An example is the sports car, which is patronized predominantly by young males, and is associated with male power. Not surprisingly, this car is typically associated with speeding and other risky driving behaviour, and has been found to be most prone of all cars to road crashes. Trucks, SUVs, and pick-ups equally ooze a sense of power and are also associated with undue rates of road crashes (Redshaw, 2011).

Youth typically have an extremely high need to “promote image, lifestyle, and mobility” and the risk-glorifying influence of the media, combining with social and cultural demands has created norms peculiar to youth (what has in many quarters been referred to as the “youth car culture”) where the need to promote a favourable image and lifestyle overrides all other considerations, including safety considerations (Redshaw, 2011, p.1). Findings by Fischer et al. (2011), among others, have amply demonstrated a positive correlation between risk-glorifying content from media and the propensity to take risks, whose eventual outcomes are played out in gory details on the roads. Media depictions of cars (for example in advertisements) play upon the need for performance and power through the use of aggressive driving, and image appeals, implying that such behaviour is not only exciting but also status-enhancing within peer or aspiration groups.

Similar to the youth car culture prevalent in New South Wales is the dominating presence of the boy-racer category in Saudi Arabia, who view driving games (e.g. racing, power sliding around selected corners, and “drifting”) as a prestigious show of manly virtue. For the social kudos that it brings, the risks are well worth taking. In any event, on account of their `driving skills’ and because they `know their own limits’, these boy racers believe that there is little real chance they will personally be injured or killed.

The dominating element of the approach taken by Enough is the use of threats, the use of the rational appeal, and simplistic, condescending appeals to the desired behaviour. Within this specific context, the threat appeals have tied the consequences of dangerous driving (the possibility of death, injury, disability, and the loss of one’s family or loved ones) to dangerous driving behaviour hoping that these threats will deter individuals from such dangerous driving behaviours.

Targeted at the boy racer category, which is a significant risk group in Saudi Arabia, it can be seen from the prism of terror management theory and the “third person effect” that this strategy is highly sub-optimal. This is especially the case when the gender restrictions within the Saudi driving realm and the role of gender in influencing behaviour within certain specific contexts are considered (Rossiter, 2010).

Attributed to Rossiter (2010), terror management theory has posited that the ultimate fear in human life is the fear of death, and that individuals respond to any reminders of this by resorting to proximal defences, which include ignoring the threat, denying it, stifling it, or resorting to rational justifications to inflate their immunity from it. For example, the individuals may justify their behaviour by stating, “it cannot happen to me since I know my limits” (Carey & Sarma, 2011). While the use of such proximal defences as coping mechanisms may effectively push the threat beyond the level of conscious awareness, Rossiter (2010) demonstrates that such fears will continue to hang on at the subconscious level, and the individual will attempt to cope with this subconscious threat through two main mechanisms:

The adoption of the prevailing social and cultural values, as a way of connecting the individual to his or her peers who share the same norms. This gives the individual a (false) sense of security and as such “shields” the individual from the threat of death.
Attempts to boost one’s self-esteem, which gives the individual the basis to face up to the anxiety stemming from the fear and also helps the individual to deny the risk exposures posed by the threat.

Given the initial exposition by Redshaw (2011) that individuals (and especially youth embedded in the youth car culture) derive their esteem from their driving habits, the use of threats as an attempt to force compliance to the desired driving behaviour is likely to push them to even more dangerous driving behaviour, which is a coping mechanism that gives them more self-esteem to face up to the anxiety associated with the fear of death and the courage to deny their susceptibility to it (Carey & Sarma, 2011). This conclusion is supported by a number of studies, including those of Jessop and Wade (2008), Arndt, Greenberg, and Cook, (2002) and Jessop, Albery, Rutter, and Garrod (2008).

An interesting finding is that these responses to threats are gender-specific, restricted as they are to males only (Jessop et al., 2008; Ben-Ari & Findler, 2003). As pointed out by Al-Ghamdi (2000a), given the culturally imposed driving restrictions on women, driving in Saudi Arabia is completely dominated by males. The use of threats, in a male dominated driving locus, is thus inappropriate and unlikely to yield the desired outcomes, given their gender-specific response to threats. Lewis, Watson, Tay, and White (2007), Zuckerman and Kuhlman (2000), Rosenbloom (2003), and Nell (2002) have also established, the “third person effect” (which equates to a proximal defence mechanism for denying the threats associated with dangerous driving) which is also typically and uniquely common among males. Furthermore, resorting to the neurological studies of Brizendine (2007, 2010), which demonstrate the distinct differences between the male and female brains, the use of threats is effective in imposing the desired emotional response among women but it typically triggers the “fight or flight” mechanism among men. In this regard therefore, the use of threats in the Enough as a way of trying to enforce compliance to the desired driving behaviours seems to be ill-advised and out of place. According to Greenberg et al. (1990), and to Zuckerman and Kuhlman (2000), positive emotional appeals (for example the humour appeal) have proved to be more effective when targeting males than fear or threat appeals, and it thus follows that Enough would have been more effective had it not been founded on the metaphorical quicksand of fear or threats.

The works of Greenberg et al. (1990), Zuckerman and Kuhlman (2000), Rosenbloom (2003), Mikulincer and Florian (2000), Strachan et al. (2007) and Hart, Shaver, and Goldenberg (2005) evince a strong relationship between an individual’s personality and his mortality salience, and to his inclination to take risks. They also find that situational factors play a significant role in an individual’s response to threats and risk-taking. Of particular interest in the analysis of Enough are the traits of authoritarianism, impulsiveness, and sensation seeking.

Greenberg et al. (1990) demonstrate the existence of a strong and positive relationship between authoritarianism and the use of proximal defence mechanisms to cope with the threat of death. This can be examined by also resorting to Geert Hofstede’s cultural framework, which views national cultures as being a function of five factors, namely: masculinity versus femininity, long-term versus short-term orientation, power distance, individualism versus collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 1997). In this framework, Saudi Arabia has been associated with a large power distance. According to the Hofstede’s cultural framework, Saudi Arabia has a power distance score of 80, suggesting that the inequality of power is not only accepted but also expected (manifest, for example, in the country’s authoritarian rule), and thus a high degree of authoritarianism inherent in the Saudi culture (Hofstede, 2012). The demonstration of a positive correlation between authoritarianism and the proximal defence mechanisms of the terror management theory may thus suggest that the propensity of the target audience to respond to threat messages (as contained in the Enough campaign) through proximal defences may not just be a trait peculiar to Saudi males but to the entire Saudi society due to its high degree of power distance. The impulsive and sensation-seeking nature of Saudi youth has also been well documented. This further underscores the inappropriateness of using threat messages to elicit the desired behavioural changes. Simple appeals to common sense and the use of the rational appeal based on casualty and injury statistics would also, in light of this exposition, be inappropriate (Carey & Sarma, 2011).

To its credit, however, the placement of campaign messages on the 2006 World Cup timetable with pictures of national team players to target young audiences can be considered to have been a major innovation for the Enough campaign. As pointed out by Elliott (2011), the likelihood of a campaign message to achieve the desired impact rests not just on its ability to be recognised, but also on its ability to be cognised, which the use of the image of this celebrity team may have helped to achieve. Whether deliberate or not, the use of these celebrities as the source model for the communication not only was a major magnet for attracting the high-risk youthful groups to the message, it also had the potential to make them identify with these celebrities (through Kelman’s process of identification); enforcing positive and strong associations between safe driving behaviours and stardom with the possibility of persuading the youth to change their attitudes or risky driving behaviour (Kelman, 1961).

While the use of symbolism may have been relevant in other cultures (such as the pinkie symbol in New South Wales) for purposes of defamiliarizing audiences from their state of habituation, symbols may be embedded in road safety messages in Saudi Arabia for a distinctly different reason: the fact that a substantial majority of some of the targeted Saudis can neither read nor write (Al-Ghamdi, 2000a). Such symbols must be culturally relevant and inoffensive to the Saudi people. Whatever approach is chosen must also accommodate the significant expatriate population, which accounts for about 44 percent of all the road accidents in the kingdom (Al-Ghamdi, 2000a).

1.1.4 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

The campaign targeted the general population although some elements of the campaign were also tailored to appeal to the high-risk youthful segment of the audience (Ministry of Interior, 2006). Within this general population was the segment made up of those aged below 40, who are considered to be the highest risk group, the married as well as the unmarried, and the local natives as well as the foreigners. It also made no distinction as to gender.

1.1.5 Choice of Media Channels

Various media were used to convey the campaign message. These included newspapers, radio, television, brochures, and roadside signs (Ministry of Interior, 2006). Newspaper advertisements (consisting of 10 by 8 centimetre stripes) were placed in the following newspapers in table 1.1 below:

Table 1.1: Newspapers Used in the Enough Campaign

NEWSPAPER	FREQUENCY
Alriyadh	9
Aljazeera	7
Alwatan	7
Okaz	8
Alyawm	5
Alriyadiyah	7

Source: Ministry of Interior, 2006.

The main radio channel used was the MBC, which is a commercial radio channel. All in all, a total of 74 advertisements were run on this channel (Ministry of Interior, 2006). With respect to television, three channels were used to convey the campaign message. These are shown in table 1.2 below:

Table 1.2: Television Channels Used in the Enough Campaign

TV CHANNEL	FREQUENCY
Almajd	94 screenings
Saudi TV Channel 1	100 screenings
Saudi TV Channel 3	100 screenings

Source: Ministry of Interior, 2006.

While Almajd TV is a commercial television channel that targets the whole family, Saudi TV Channel 3 is government owned and is primarily a sports channel. Apart from the use of commercials (program sponsorship was undertaken with the aim of creating and enhancing awareness), also employed were ‘traffic friends’, children’s stories, and 500,000 copies of brochures distributed to Saudi schools. (Ministry of Interior, 2006).

The brochures were designed to include pictures of the country’s national football team players, together with the 2006 World Cup timetable. This was an effective way of reaching the younger audiences (Ministry of Interior, 2006). Given the campaign’s objective of reaching out to the entire general audience, the use of the mass media channels (TV, radio, mass circulation newspapers, and roadside signs) was also apt.

A major observation which can be made out from the various media channels deployed in the Enough campaign is the propensity towards enhancing both the reach (through the predominant use of mass media channels as described above) and the frequency (note the many commercials and advertisements repeatedly run in the various channels within the 30 day lifespan of the campaign as shown in table 4.2 above) of the message. The focus on the scheduling of the campaign publicity is also underscored by the enormity of the media budget (more than AU$650,000) with sponsors such as Mobily contributing additional resources) (Ministry of Interior, 2006). Conventional approaches towards media scheduling in order to achieve the highest impact have been based on a rule of thumb deriving from Krugman’s ideas, which assert that for an advertisement to achieve the desired impact, it must be seen at least three times (Krugman, 1972). While the first exposure arouses curiosity from the viewers, the second one invites consideration from them and the third one merely elicits recognition. After the third exposure, the viewers begin to disengage from the message (Naples, 1979; Leckenby & Kim, 1994). Increasingly, however, alternative approaches grounded on empirical fact have begun challenging this traditional rule of thumb. These view the minimum three exposures advocated by the traditional rule of thumb as one too many, and instead advocate for the maximisation of reach rather than frequency (Ephron, 1995; Jones, 1995, 1998).

Whichever of these perspectives one adopts; it is easy to surmise that the scheduling of the Enough overreached itself with respect to the issue of frequency. As du Plessis (2005, 2011) argues, heavy consumers of the media received far too many exposures, which leads to significant redundancy that might have been reduced (or even entirely avoided) by deploying the resources to reach more audiences beyond the media being currently used. In this way, even heavy users will get only one or two exposures, but so will many other audiences beyond the media being currently used receive their first or extra exposure.

In instances where the nature of the campaign dictates the use of as many frequencies as possible, it is typically the case that the frequency is high during the first exposure but reduced gradually towards the recognition (and after that disengagement) stage (Kim, 1994). This is absent in the execution of Enough, suggesting some degree of waste associated with its media scheduling.

Taking into account the considerations outlined in the theoretical frameworks behind the study and those outlined under the media selection, one would naturally infer that the focus of the Enough campaign was on the scheduling of the campaign (its reach, frequency, and media budget) rather than on the creative content; in complete disregard of the fact that campaign success is a function of both reach and frequency and the creative content.

1.1.6 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

The effectiveness of the Enough campaign has not been extensively evaluated. Within such a context characterised by the glaring dearth of evaluation data, the assessment of the Enough campaign carried out by Rashidi (2006) stands out. His evaluation was designed in the form of a survey, which sampled 269 respondents aged above 15 years. With a response rate of 95.9 percent, Rashidi’s evaluation (Rashidi, 2006) broadly indicated that the Enough was a huge success.

According to the evaluation, approximately 70 percent of the respondents reported to adhere to speeding limits suggesting that the campaign had an impact in enforcing the desired speed limits. In contrast, only three out of ten of the respondents reported to have been involved in speed-related misdemeanours (Rashidi, 2006). Additionally, 85 percent of all the respondents reported to have adhered to traffic light signals, indicating that the campaign was effective in reducing incidences of jumping the lights. Most of the respondents rated highly the effectiveness of the campaign, with over 84 percent of them agreeing that it should be continued. The consequences associated with road crashes, which were thought to be most significant, included the impact of such accidents on families and individuals, as well as the injuries and heath complications visited upon road crash victims due to such accidents (Rashidi, 2006). In much the same way as was done in Victoria with the “Everybody Hurts” campaign, in order to drive the road safety message home this latter point may provide the basis to deploy the concept of emotional contagion.

respondents rated the radio and the mosque as the least effective media through which road safety messages can be delivered, while law enforcement activities carried out by the police were viewed as being highly effective (Rashidi, 2006).

Relying as it does on self-reported behaviour and actions, which inherently suffer from a high degree of self-reporting bias, the study’s use of the non-empirical “descriptive analytical method” was a major weakness in the evaluation. No attempt was made to evaluate the number of road accidents and their causes over the period of the campaign, and to carry out causality tests to link any reduction in road crashes (if it really occurred) to specific behavioural or attitudinal changes. Even if it were observed that road accidents did decline over this period (which road accident data and traffic statistics do not seem to support), mere correlation does not imply causation and there is simply no empirical evidence to back up the conclusions arrived at by this evaluative study.

Additionally, given Saudi Arabia’s population of about 30 million people (CIA, 2012); the sample size of 369 respondents used in the study was too small. Small sample sizes tend to not only introduce bias but also to be unrepresentative of the population. Therefore, not much may be inferred from Rashidi’s study (2006) except the fact that it supports the effectiveness of Enough.

Notwithstanding this, support for the success of the Enough has also been voiced by Algamass (2010), who asserts that the total number of car accidents in KSA reduced to 283,648 during 2006, compared with 296,015 in 2005. This equates to a statistically significant 5.4 percent decrease on the 2005 figures and may point to the longer term efficacy of the campaign . While the issue of attribution remains inherently uncertain, as it does with the NSW `Pinkie’ campaign, a legitimate comparative question remains: what might account for the relatively diminished impact of the Enough, vis-à-vis Pinkie, which (even on the most conservative of estimates) appears to have been three times as effective? Making such an assessment more difficult is that no published literature is available that sets out results of any evaluation of Enough. It is precisely gaps in knowledge of this sort, and the resulting inability to make and learn from comparative evaluations, that this thesis seeks to address.

1.2 The “Salamaty” Campaign

1.2.1 Introduction

The Salamaty campaign was unveiled in April 2010, and was a comprehensive road safety campaign, which incorporated various components to achieve its brief, including publicity and law enforcement activities (Public Security Directorate, 2010). The initiative embraced a number of objectives, including: to reduce traffic offences as a way of enhancing road safety, to create and foster mutually cooperative relationships between the police and the audiences targeted, to educate the public on how the new traffic management system dubbed “Saher” works, to increase the visibility of traffic law enforcement, and to raise awareness among the public on the need for individual responsibility towards the achievement of road safety (Public Security Directorate, 2010). The law enforcement portion of the campaign was executed by a combined team of traffic, highway, and patrol police (Public Security Directorate. 2010). The awareness portion of the campaign was carried out in four stages, each stage running for one month before breaking for two months to allow for the subsequent stage, and at the end of each stage of the campaign, campaign effectiveness was evaluated (Public Security Directorate, 2010).

1.2.2 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the Campaign

In view of the major causes of road accidents in Saudi Arabia, the following were identified as the major behaviours that Salamaty would target (Public Security Directorate, 2010):

Speeding
Violation of traffic rules (including jumping of red lights, improper overtaking, driving on the wrong side of the road, alighting from a moving vehicle, making illegal turns, driving without a license or numberplate, and loss of concentration while driving, among others).
Failure to wear seatbelts
Fatigue
Pedestrian and vehicle safety

1.2.3 Message

The Salamaty campaign involved three speeding advertisements, two pedestrian advertisements, three advertisements about tyre safety, as well as advertisements on security. Reviewed here one of the speeding commercials. This commercial is 33 seconds long. Its scene sequence opens with a bird’s eye view of a busy eight-lane highway with vehicles moving in all directions. This fades into a medium shot of the instrument panel of a single car as it speeds along the highway. This scene is then interrupted by the cutaway shot of a speeding toy car in a video game. For the next few seconds, these two shots alternate (the crosscutting technique), effectively manifesting the use of reverse angle shots to compare the two different scenes. This also suggests the use of parallel editing (or the inter-cutting technique).

The maximum deflection of the speed needle in both shots and the fast pan of the camera to create the illusion of vegetation and roads “flying past” suggest that both the real car on the highway and the toy car in the video game are moving at extremely fast speeds. Eventually, the toy car in the video game loses control as it races to catch up with another one ahead of it, hits an embankment by the side of the road, and rolls over. A close up shot of a boy behind the wheel of the video game car is revealed, as the two shots are brought together and juxtaposed on the same screen, using the parallel editing technique, followed by the words, “Car’s not a toy.”

Figure 1.3: Image from the Salamaty commercial. Notice the use of the parallel editing technique with the real car on the highway (left) being juxtaposed against the toy car in the video game (right).

Apart from the TV commercial reviewed here, various other messages were conveyed during each of the four stages of the campaign using different techniques. At each stage, five traffic themes and one security theme were explored. During the first stage of the campaign, the five traffic themes that were explored included speeding, violation of traffic lights, rules regarding roundabouts, seatbelts, and pedestrian safety. The main security topic addressed issues surrounding alighting from a moving vehicle as well as the practice of leaving valuables in one’s vehicle and thus exposing them to the risk of being stolen (Public Security Directorate, 2010). In the second phase, the message revolved around five traffic themes, which included: vehicle safety, being busy with something else other than the road, tyre safety, fatigue, and overtaking skills. The main security topic revolved around home security (Public Security Directorate, 2010). The third and penultimate stage included various traffic messages: for example, the violation of traffic signs, driving without a driver’s license, driving on the wrong side of the road, abrupt stops on the road, and driving by young people. The security topic revolved around the need for the members of the target audience to be more responsible citizens and patriotic to their country (Public Security Directorate, 2010).

1.2.4 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the Campaign Messages

In some respects, the creative concept behind the Salamaty commercial reviewed here resembles that of the “No Extra Life” campaign of Sweden reviewed in an earlier section. The common ground between the two is that both resort to the use of defamiliarization techniques (and more specifically metaphor) to send their message across, and in doing so, both use the racing car of the gaming world as the “vehicle” for transferring the intended meaning to the “tenor” (Kaplan, 1990, p.41).

In the absence of an oral narrative in this Salamaty commercial, the metaphorical concept is powerfully achieved and delivered by means of the parallel editing technique where the toy car in the racing game is juxtaposed against the real car thus bringing into sharp focus the similarities and stark contrast extant between the vehicle and the tenor, and inviting the audience to stretch their imagination and create the desired meaning. In using light to merely enhance the visibility of the images in the commercial but neglecting the artistic use of light and shadow to also create mood and characterization, the framers of this commercial lost an opportunity to add punch to the message. Nonetheless, the commercial reviewed is fresh, and marks a clean break from the cognitively stale Saudi road safety messages of yesteryear that hinged either on coercive or simplistic and condescending appeals.

The major weakness of Salamaty is its inability to weave together the various elements of the message into one unified message. This could have been achieved through the adoption of an IMC (integrated marketing communication) approach. Such an approach should have unified the creative approach used in this commercial with the other approaches used in other elements of the Salamaty campaign.

The message in the last stage of the Salamaty campaign revolved around the following themes: overloading, safe driving techniques during bad weather, the need to ensure enough room between one’s vehicle and the next one, illegal u-turns, and the dangers of driving without a number plate. The main security topic revolved around the primary policing role of the citizen (Public Security Directorate, 2010).

This approach recognises not just the human factor in road accidents in Saudi Arabia, but also acknowledges the role of road, vehicular and environmental factors in causing accidents. Within the specific context of Saudi Arabia, this is important since only 57 percent of all accidents are attributable to human factors (Al-Ghamdi, 2000a). That said however, the impact of messages such as “home security” on dangerous driving behaviours and road accidents remains to be seen. Additionally, as it has already been pointed out, the major causes of road accidents in Saudi Arabia include speeding, failure to adhere to traffic regulations (e.g. jumping red lights or making illegal turns), failure to wear seatbelts, and talking on the phone while driving (Al-Ghamdi, 2000; 2000b; 2002). By belabouring issues such as overloading at the expense of the weightier causes of road carnage, a major weakness of the Enough campaign was that it focussed a lot of attention on the less deserving themes at the expense of the core message.

According to Rhys (1954), concepts from Aristotelian rhetoric can be used effectively. Pathos – the use of physical appearances to ease the perceiving eye into a certain frame of mind in order to goad the audience into agreement with the message – can be a powerful persuasive tool especially within low elaboration contexts (Rhys, 1954). To achieve this, many advertisements (including the ones evaluated in other sections) deploy the use of attractive male and female models (Blair, Stephenson & Green, 2006). Others use the Aristotelian techniques of ethos and logos: the deployment of celebrities as the source model for the communication (thereby achieving persuasion through the process of identification), or the use of experts (thereby achieving persuasion through the process of internalization) (Kelman, 1961; Rhys, 1954).

Unlike these advertisements, the key source model for communication for the other elements of Salamaty was the Saudi police. In each of the four stages of the awareness phase of Salamaty, the police not only appeared in the media in an effort to raise awareness but they were also actively involved in the design of the campaign’s message in the local newspapers and by visiting educational institutions to educate students and distribute campaign material (Public Security Directorate, 2010).

The persistent use of the logos (driving and safety lessons, which assumes a high elaboration context that are rarely the case in the road safety milieux) to convey the message, is a major weaknesses of the campaign’s conceptual approach. So also is the use of the police to deliver the messages in a ‘top-down’, ‘Big Brother’ manner. Due to its patronising nature this seldom works and within certain contexts has been proved to breed resistance to the message.

Although the TV commercial used in the Enough campaign acknowledged the low elaboration context of the road safety message and presented its message through the peripheral route as advocated for by the elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), the other elements of Salamaty erred on the side of the highly cognitive by using driving and safety lessons which require higher order logical processes and thus dulled the thrust of the campaign. That most of these messages were fashioned by the police, who have no specialization in communication, may provide ample explanation of why this is the case.

The overarching use of coercive law enforcement activities to ensure the success of Salamaty road safety drive no doubt contributed to the success of the road safety publicity campaign. However, the use of coercive tactics to ensure compliance has in most contexts been regarded through the perspective of Skinner’s theory of behavioural modification (Skinner, 1953).

The coercive threats here equate to the negative reinforces, which impose compliance as long as they are in place, but result into the drivers falling back to their old bad habits as soon as the negative reinforces are withdrawn. Little wonder then that adherence to road safety laws in the kingdom tends to be high during such campaigns, but reverts back to its normal (or worse states) once the campaign has ended. Addressing the short-lived nature of road safety campaign successes requires the use of disruptive approaches based on proven theoretical models, such as that adopted by the commercial reviewed. Surely an approach that takes after the S-R (stimulus-response) theory of positive reinforcement would be more applicable here (Skinner, 1953). In addition, while appealing to the broad majority of Saudi native, the use of the Arabic language in the Salamaty TV Commercial may have excluded the immigrant non-Arabic population which as shown, accounts for a substantial proportion of road accidents in the Kingdom.

1.2.5 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

Rather than being specifically targeted at certain distinct demographic segments with a precise message, Salamaty was targeted at the general population. As already outlined, five different messages of a road traffic nature and one of a security nature were targeted at each of the four stages of the campaign execution (Public Security Directorate, 2010). The specific use of the metaphor from the gaming world also suggests a specific attempt, particularly by the television commercial, to target youthful drivers who have formed a habit of speeding.

1.2.6 Choice of Media Channels

The main channels used to deliver the core message of Salamaty were local newspapers and television. These may be considered appropriate due to their mass-appeal, given also the desire to target the broad audience rather than specific segments within it. Additionally, the message was disseminated through the use of printed material, distributed to schools and other educational institutions by the police, while cooperation with driving schools also ensured that these schools were used as points for the dissemination of the campaign’s message (Public Security Directorate, 2010).

1.2.7 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

The responsibility for the evaluation of Salamaty was from the onset vested in the Centre of Researches and Studies, Public Security Directorate. The evaluation was carried out after each of the four stages of the campaign, and then after the whole campaign had ended. This was done by comparing the trends in the number of accidents, injuries, traffic violations, and fatalities before, during and after each of the four stages of the campaign (Public Security Directorate, 2011).

The first stage commenced in the second week of April 2010, and concluded after a month. The statistics relating to this stage are presented in table 1.3 below:

Table 1.3: Accident Statistics Relating to Stage 1 of the Salamaty Campaign

Period	Car accidents	Death	Injuries	Violations
Before the campaign From 15/02 To 16/03	43,338	481	3122	795,930
During the campaign From 12/04To 10/05	41,917	545	3359	888,838
After the campaign From 15/05 To 13/06	26,951	971	2994	754,066
Total	112,214	1997	9475	2,438,824

Source: Public Security Directorate (2010)

As table 1.3 above shows, there was a marked improvement in car accidents during and after the first stage of the Salamaty campaign. However, there was an increase in the number of car-crash related deaths during and after the campaign. Injuries increased during the campaign, before falling back to levels lower than they had been after the end of the campaign. Traffic violations also registered a steep increase during the campaign, before declining after the campaign. Overall therefore, the first stage seems to have reduced the number of car accidents, injuries, and violations, but failed to reduce the number of deaths.

The reduction in the number of accidents during and after the first stage of the campaign suggests that the campaign may have been effective in raising awareness about the perils of road accidents and in triggering the desired attitudinal and behavioural change among the drivers. The increase in the number of deaths during and after the campaign, notwithstanding the decline in the number of accidents, suggests that while the campaign had resulted into fewer accidents, these relatively fewer accidents had a higher degree of severity. One implication of this is that among those drivers whom the campaign had either failed to reach or to convince to change their dangerous driving attitudes and behaviour, speeds may have increased leading to higher-impact collisions hence more deaths and fewer injuries. Table 1.4 below shows the results for the second stage of the campaign:

Table 1.4: Accident Statistics Relating to Stage 2 of the Salamaty Campaign

Period	Car accidents	Death	Injuries	Violations
Before the campaign From 15/05 To 13/06	26,959	971	2,994	754,066
During the campaign From 27/06 To 26/07	23,128	990	2,988	747,106
After the campaign From 11/08 To 09/09	21,528	563	4,026	376,283
Total	71,615	2524	10,008	1,835,871

Source: Public Security Directorate (2010)

Considered on its own, this witnessed a reduction in the number of car accidents, and violations during and after the campaign. Deaths increased during the campaign period but fell back below the pre-campaign levels after the campaign was over. Injuries increased all through the two periods. Table 1.5 below shows the data for the third stage of the Salamaty campaign:

Table 1.5: Accident Statistics Relating to Stage 3 of the Salamaty Campaign

Period	Car accidents	Death	Injuries	Violations
Before the campaign From 11/08 To 09/09	21,528	553	4,026	376,282
During the campaign From 24/09 To 19/10	23,312	410	3,519	712,713
After the campaign From 07/11 To 06/12	40,313	581	3,112	689,914
Total	85,193	1554	10657	1,778,909

Source: Public Security Directorate (2010).

Table 1.5 above can also be illustrated using line graphs, as shown in figures 1.4 to 1.7 below:

Figure 1.4: Car accidents during stage 3 of Salamaty

Figure 1.5: Number of deaths during stage 3 of Salamaty

Figure 1.6: Number of violations during stage 3 of Salamaty

Figure 1.7: Number of injuries during stage 3 of Salamaty

As the table 1.5 and figures 1.4 – 1.7 above demonstrate, in the third stage, the number of road accidents increased both during and after the campaign. The number of deaths fell during the campaign period, but increased after the campaign period. Violations increased sharply during the campaign, but marginally fell after the campaign was over, while the number of injuries declined all through. The results of the fourth and final stage are shown in table 1.6 below:

Table 1.6: Accident Statistics Relating to Stage 4 of the Salamaty Campaign

Period	Car accidents	Deaths	Injuries	Violations
Before the campaign From 07/12/10 To 05/01/11	17,410	1,111	1,430	736,607
During the campaign From 05/01 To 03/02	17,092	1,065	1,402	576,521
After the campaign From 04/02 To 05/03	43,818	579	3,377	655,106
Total	78,310	2,755	6,209	1,968,231

Source: Public Security Directorate, 2010.

In the fourth stage, as depicted in table 1.6 above, the number of car accidents declined slightly during the campaign but then registered a sharp increase after the campaign was over. This trend can also be illustrated by means of the column graph in figure 1.8 below:

Figure 1.8: Number of injuries during stage 4 of Salamaty

The number of injuries also declined during the campaign period, only to dramatically shoot up after the campaign was over, as illustrated in the column graph in figure 1.9 below:

Figure 1.9: Number of injuries during stage 4 of Salamaty

Similarly, the number of violations dropped when the campaign was in progress, but shot up once the campaign was over as illustrated by the column graph in figure 1.10 below:

Figure 1.10: Number of violations during stage 4 of Salamaty

However, the number of deaths decreased during the campaign period and after the campaign was over as illustrated by the column graph in figure 1.11 below:

Figure 1.11: Number of deaths during stage 4 of the Salamaty

Finally, the different figures presented in tables 1.3 to 1.6 above are added together to give a summative view of the violation, death, injury, and car accident statistics for the entire period during which the Salamaty campaign ran. The data is summarised in table 1.7 below:

Table 1.7: Accident Statistics Relating to All Stages of the Salamaty Campaign

Period	Car accidents	Death	Injuries	Violations
Before the campaign	103,804	2,718	12,604	2,285,091
During the campaign	105,449	3,015	11,268	2,925,178
After the campaign	150,857	5,583	10,121	2,811,579
Total	360,110	11,316	33,993	8,021,841

Source: Public Security Directorate (2010).

Although the numbers of violations, accidents, injuries and death fluctuated, in comparison with previous years, due to weather circumstances and seasonal differences, such as the back-to-school season, this interim small decrease in numbers probably did not result from the public relations side of the campaign. This is because the campaign focused on the law enforcement side rather than the media side. Another important factor that may have contributed to the small change in numbers was that the campaign was run when SAHER was first implemented, where speed and red light fines are controlled by camera systems. A further factor during the campaign was that office workers from traffic departments were utilized to support law enforcement efforts in the field. It is not certain whether this would have actually decreased those numbers; it may in fact have had a negative effect, because the office workers have no rights to issue tickets, and were not being paid for this extra work – possibly leading to the public not taking them seriously. Without the fear of being booked, some of the public may have decided that they could flout the law with impunity. Based on the summative data presented in table 1.7 above, the analysis concludes that the number of car accidents increased from 103,804 accidents to 150,857 accidents. This represents a 45.3 percent increase in the number of accidents. Deaths rose from a low of 2,718 to a high of 5,583, signifying an increase of 105.4 percent. Injuries experienced a decline, from 12,604 to 10,121, which translates into a 19.7 percent reduction. The number of violations also experienced an increase to 2.8 million, which represents a 23 percent increase. This is also illustrated in the two graphs in figures 1.12 and 1.13 respectively:

Figure 1.12: Number of deaths, accidents and injuries over the entire campaign period

Figure 1.13: Number of violations over the entire campaign period

The increase in the number of violations during each campaign probably reflects the presence of more police on the road. While this evaluation suggests that the Salamaty campaign has on the whole not been able to reduce car accidents, injuries, violations, or deaths; it is instructive to note that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. That is, the evaluation of the campaign provides for no empirical mechanism to directly attribute certain trends in road accident fatalities, injuries, or violations to specific aspects of the campaign.

1.3 Conclusion

When complemented with other efforts, publicity/advertisements are an effective means of enhancing safety on the road (Elliott, 2011). Road safety campaigns aim to achieve a number of objectives. These objectives include raising heightened awareness about a driving problem or behaviour, prompting interpersonal influence by stimulating conversations within and between groups of road users, reinforcing the existing beliefs/attitudes or shaping the formation of new ones, enhancing the visibility of particular issues, and stimulating road users to undertake information search with regards to particular road safety issues.

The achievement of these objectives depends on how well the road safety advertisement is designed. A major requirement is that the campaign be organised scientifically. This is evident in the Pinkie campaign in New South Wales, “Live with It” in the UK, “Everybody Hurts” in Victoria, and “No Extra Life” in Sweden. All these campaigns are organised around problems identified from data that has been collected through knowledge and attitude surveys, as well as from crash statistics and casualty data. Apart from being data-led, all the campaigns evince a strategic campaign planning process incorporating a consideration of the target audience, their motivations, and their behaviour; with message content and media selection being undertaken in light of the target audience’s profiles.

Apart from being scientifically formulated, these campaigns owe a large part of their success to their disruptive nature. In a world where people are bombarded with information to the point of saturation, road safety advertisements must be designed to stand out if they have to be effective. Also, the tendency for the target audiences to become desensitised to a message is high, especially when the same message is repeated over and over again, using the same old strategies and approaches. In the extended metaphor of the Extra Life extant in the gaming world, the concept of emotional contagion, the symbolism of the pinkie finger, and the emotional lifelong burden that the haunted must live with; these four campaigns literally make a clean break with the time-worn approaches of previous campaigns and in so doing break the mould and compel the audiences to stand up and take notice of the road safety message.

In spite of being the first campaign in Saudi Arabia to adopt a specific and explicit focus on road safety, a major problem with the Enough campaign was that in spite of the rich opportunity offered by Saudi Arabia’s demographic profile to target specific messages to specific audiences in order to correct specific aberrant behaviours, the campaign lost its punch by being too general. The use of at least ten messages (some of which are not mutually reinforcing) in a time period spanning just 30 days, translated into a confusing and crowded communication. Additionally, the campaign rested on a theoretical foundation of threats/fear, which as illustrated is neither useful nor effective within the Saudi context. Another weakness of the Enough campaign was the wasteful nature of its media scheduling.

Consequently, future road safety campaigns in Saudi Arabia may consider segmenting the entire Saudi driving population using demographic variables (for example, age and gender), psychographic variables (for example, lifestyles, attitudes, values and interests), and geographical variables (large cities versus rural towns). Having done this, the campaigns should adopt a multi-targeted strategy, where different messages employing different appeals and using different media channels are targeted for each segment. For example, segmenting on the basis of age, gender and values; the campaigns may choose to target the Saudi boy-racer segment with a speeding message which employs similar tactics to those of the Pinkie campaign discussed earlier on with reference to road safety in New South Wales. The message would, furthermore, be disseminated through communication channels that this segment most frequently patronises, such as the Internet. This would, in turn, increase the relevance of the message and result into more effective resource use.

A unique characteristic of Saudi Arabia is that it is purist Islamic state and religious beliefs and values are taken seriously by most Saudi Arabians (CIA, 2012). Road safety messages targeting at changing dangerous driving attitudes and behaviours can anchor their appeal on Islam, with the dangerous drifting behaviours being packaged as haram. This religious appeal can drive the desired behavioural change more effectively than even strict safe driving laws can. It would also stimulate conversation about the need to adopt safe driving habits, with such forums as mosques becoming focal points for such discussions.

Since effective road safety campaigns must be systematic and data-led, Saudi Arabian authorities charged with the responsibility of ensuring safer driving habits on Saudi Arabia roads must also undertake capacity building initiatives aimed at enhancing the gathering and analysis of traffic safety data, and of the effectiveness of any road safety campaign for control purposes. This would be the starting point of any serious road safety campaign.

The Salamaty campaign must be praised for its acknowledgement of factors other than human factors in the incidence of road accidents in Saudi Arabia. These include vehicular, road, and environmental factors. However, that is where the positive aspect of the campaign ends. The commercials used in the campaign, and especially the one reviewed here, score high marks in the use of a creative approach to deliver the message. To its detriment, the inability to unify the various messages conveyed through the various approaches adopted in the campaign makes the core communication too crowded and confusing (it has four stages, each of which has six messages, some of which are not relevant to road safety). Some of the approaches use high cognition in a low elaboration context. Others use coercive law enforcement, which can be equated with Skinner’s negative reinforcement that leads to worse outcomes when the stimulus for good behaviour is withdrawn (Skinner, 1953). The use of policemen in the design and presentation of the message further strips the message of its pathos and ethos and renders it less effective.

From the “Pinkie”, “Everybody Hurts”, “Live with It”, and “No Extra Life’ campaigns therefore, the Saudi Arabian campaigns can derive a number of lessons. One lesson that Saudi Arabian road safety campaigners may learn is the need to adopt a scientific, systematic, and data-led approach to campaign design and execution. The Saudi campaigns must also improve on their creative content. More specifically and with reference to the latter point, some of the theoretical models which campaign executioners in Saudi Arabia can borrow from these four campaigns and customise to the local Saudi context in order to create disruptive and effective communication are: the use of the emotional contagion concept (Sigal, 2002), the use of defamiliarisation techniques such as symbolism and metaphors (Shklovsy, 1925), and the use of emotional appeals (other than fear/threats). These are invaluable lessons, which Saudi campaigns such as Enough and Salamaty would do well to learn from, if the road safety scourge on Saudi roads is to be tamed.

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[1] The Pinkie commercial is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqWO7fzwSLM

[2] P-Platers refer to drivers holding a provisional license. This license is valid for a period of three years, and is only issued to applicants who have attained the age of seventeen, and who have held a learner’s licence for no less than six months and passed a driving test or successfully completed a logbook in the presence of a certified instructor. They are required to display the p-plate on their cars, a red-on-white plate reflecting their status (State Government of Victoria, 2012).

[3] On YouTube there are several videos of responses to the Pinkie adverts. Some are funny, but some take the message and distort it to suit the videoblogger’s own goals.

[4] The 3 minute Montage of “Everybody Hurts” is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al25O1MW8dM

[5] The “Live with It” commercial is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7fhzDUOsxI

[6] ABC1 is a socio-economic group which brings together the A (upper middle class, composed of those working in top managerial, professional and administrative positions), B (middle class, made up of those working in middle level managerial, professional, and administrative positions), and C1 (lower middle class, made up of those working in clerical, supervisory, or lower managerial, professional and administrative cadres) social classes. When grouped in this manner, ABC1 refers to the UK’s middle class (Wilmshurst and MacKay, 1999).

[7] That is, the upper middle class and the middle class (Wilmshurst and MacKay, 1999).

[8] That is, lower middle class and the skilled working class (Wilmshurst and MacKay, 1999).

[9] Working Class (Wilmshurst and MacKay, 1999).

[10] Those at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder (Wilmshurst and MacKay, 1999).

[11] “No Extra Life” is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0NY9tfJtgA

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Case Studies: Developed Countries

3 Case Studies: Developed Countries

3.1 New South Wales: “No One Thinks Big of You” / the Pinkie Campaign

3.1.1 Reasons for the Choice of the Pinkie Campaign

3.1.2 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the Pinkie Campaign

3.1.3 Message Design

3.1.4 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the Pinkie Campaign Messages

3.1.5 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

3.1.6 Choice of Media Channels

3.1.7 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

3.2 Victoria: “Everybody Hurts When You Speed”

3.2.1 Introduction

3.2.2 Reason for the Choice of the “Everybody Hurts” Campaign

3.2.3 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the “Everybody Hurts” Campaign

3.2.5 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the “Everybody Hurts” Campaign Messages

3.2.6 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

3.2.7 Choice of Media Channels

3.2.8 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

3.3 UK: “Live with It” Campaign

3.3.1 Introduction

3.3.2 Reason for the Choice of the “Live with It” Campaign”

3.3.3 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the “Think!” Campaigns

3.3.4 Message Design

3.3.5 The Use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the “Live with It” Campaign

3.3.6 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

3.3.7 Choice of Media Channels

3.3.8 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

3.4 UK: “Live with It” Campaign

3.4.1 Introduction

3.4.2 Reasons for the Choice of the “No Extra Life” Campaign

3.4.3 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the Campaign

3.4.4 Message Design

3.4.5 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the Campaign Messages

3.4.6 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

3.4.7 Choice of Media Channels

3.4.8 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

3.5 Conclusion

Case Studies, Developing Country (Saudi Arabia)

1.0 Introduction

1.1 The Enough Campaign

1.1.1 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the Enough Campaign

1.1.2 Message

1.1.3 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the Campaign Messages

1.1.4 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

1.1.5 Choice of Media Channels

1.1.6 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

1.2 The “Salamaty” Campaign

1.2.1 Introduction

1.2.2 Identification of Target Behaviour and Target Audience for the Campaign

1.2.3 Message

1.2.4 The use of Theoretical Models in Underpinning the Conceptual Design of the Campaign Messages

1.2.5 Audience Segmentation and Targeting

1.2.6 Choice of Media Channels

1.2.7 Evaluation of Campaign Effectiveness

1.3 Conclusion

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