The French road safety authority just released an add about drunk driving. Since it’s targeting youths, targeting youth, they decided to broadcast over the internet instead of TV (maybe also because the general public might find it too shocking, I don’t know).
Basically it depicts an accident and the following intervention by rescue teams (Not in the exact order of the events. For instance the gendarmerie rings at the mother’s door bell before the accident is shown, a couple is waiting for friends following a heavy drinking that is shown only later…And it’s in French, of course, but you don’t really need to understand the language to understand what is going on, I think).
Looking around I found another add (British I suppose, since it’s in English and people drive on the left) using the exact same concept, except it’s about texting while driving.
It’s there : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG7cPOE8uQQ&feature=related (WARNING : GRAPHIC TOO)
A number of people here think that this kind of ads are too violent and graphic to be shown, and that drivers can’t identify with the “characters” (contrarily to “softer” adds) hence that is only going to reinforce the “This can’t happen to me” idea. Others that it’s what it takes for people to react.
Personally I tend to agree with the latter group. What’s your opinion?
For contrast, here the previous campaign by the road safety authority (again I don’t think you need to understand French to get it), called “phone calls” :
I think the more graphic the better; getting people to take driving seriously is a personal campaign of mine. Do people think having your body torn up in a car collision is NOT graphic? The odds of that happening to each and every one of us are far too high.
The more explicit the better. Maybe the occasional sociopath won’t be affected, but the more that can pierce the walls of dumbfuck stupidity some people have, the better.
Another vote for the more graphic versions. We have a few around here for driving safety and also workplace safety (the lady who slips on the floor and ends up with a huge pot of boiling water on her face…you don’t see it happen, but you hear it. Ugh.) and I think they make a big impact.
Definitely more explicit. Otherwise a lot of people simply won’t notice them.
It is also possible to be explicit and soft at the same time. There’s a British advert which starts with the voiceover saying that, on this day, the mother was killed by her son. They get in the car, have a normal conversation, then have a minor accident - and the son, who had refused to put his seatbelt on, flips forward and knocks his mother’s into the windscreen. He’s fine, physically, but she’s dead. It’s done in an understated way but there’s nothing soft about it.
It’s really hard to say. A lot of us have been conditioned by years of “slice and dice” and “slasher” movies, which have, over time, become more graphic and more realistic-looking.
A lot of those who are older were exposed to similar movies in Driver’s Training classes in high school, for example, “Highways of Agony”, “Signal 30”, and “Red Asphalt”. I recall “Signal 30” in particular because it didn’t just look real, it was real (or so they said at the beginning) footage of the aftermath of various car accidents. These movies impacted because they were the most horrific thing we had ever seen on film up to that time.
After a 16 year-old has already seen something like one of the “Saw” or “Hostel” movies, how the hell can you top that? It’s a hard act to follow for a PSA, and they have to get even more gruesome yet remain realistic in their scenarios so that they don’t become a parody of themselves. Perhaps the answer is to show them earlier before kids become jaded by gore.
In the ones originally posted, the first French one wasn’t really all that shocking; perhaps though the language barrier was to blame, and it would have made more of an impact on me if I knew what they were saying. The second French one worked on a more “human” level, but was still far too subtle. The British one about texting while driving was horrific enough, especially in regard to the innocent people caught up in it (the little kid who was the only survivor in his family, for example).
My province hasn’t done a great job in regard to these types of PSA’s, which is particularly problematic because the drinking age is 18 here, (although one may drink under parental supervision at 16 and 17), so every year we hear about at least one kid who got killed after his high school grad.
Depends on the media. I don’t want to see graphic ads for much of anything when I’m watching TV. Don’t like the abused animals with tearjerker music ads, don’t want to see dismembered accident victims. Didn’t like the “Blood on the Highway” scare flicks they showed us in high school. Don’t really think kids take those things seriously anyway. We didn’t.
Then again, if somebody wants to do these ads somewhere I’m not likely to see them, I don’t mind. Just not during football or shows I like.