Two BBDO safe driving campaigns in the same week. If you love advertising, you probably also think it’s interesting to compare them. Here’s the link to Colenso BBDO and Finch’s campaign for VW.
Speeding is one of the main causes of traffic accidents in Russia just like it is in New Zealand (in fact, everywhere in the world, but that info is outside the scope of this story). Every year in Russia, around 200 thousand people are injured or killed.
BBDO Russia’s client is INTOUCH, an insurance company. It promotes responsible driving like AAMI does in Australia. That safe driving is a smart platform for an insurer to stand on goes without saying.
Some of the most viewed videos on the internet in Russian are crash videos captured on dash cams, which are popular across our country. BBDO decided to appropriate their form for attention, give it a twist for impact and use of the popularity of crash videos to maximise the campaign’s reach.
The dashboard cam video records a car following another car for ten minutes. In this primary video, nothing happens. One car overtakes another car that was maintaining the allowed speed. Nothing more. But that thwarts every viewer’s expectations. The video is called, Most terrible fatal car crash ever.
What the agency has done is to insert single alternate (disaster) frames into the primary film at given intervals. This makes the viewer check out the timeline thumbnails [this one included: ed] look at the action from the alternative footage instead of the primary one.
By clicking on it, the user expects to see the accident mentioned. But the video doesn’t meet expectations. Because viewers, like drivers, are impatient, they want to find the promised car crash quickly. As soon as the user drags the timeline forward to find the crash, he sees the alternative sequence in the preview window. The car veers off into the oncoming lane, where a head on collision with a red truck occurs. Then the user sees BBDO’s message – Don’t Rush!
A lot of digital creative claims to be interactive and experiential these days. This one is.
