Serviceplan’s class photos without children win Cristal Gold

30 Parisian children die or are injured every year in road traffic accidents in Ile-de-France, the region that includes Paris. That’s the equivalent of one entire class of pupils.

Last year, Serviceplan France created an outreach campaign, The Empty Classroom Picture, to help the Parisian Road Safety Authority (Sécurité Routière Paris et Ile de France) to impress on parents the importance of teaching school children about road safety.

That campaign has just won Gold and 2 Bronze awards at Cristal Festival – the Gold in Media/Best Use of Ambient, one Bronze in Promo & Direct/Public Interest and the other Bronze in Promo & Direct/Best Use of Ambient.

The campaign appropriated the annual class photo, that parents look forward to seeing. When parents in the campaign area received theirs, they saw a photo that was empty of children. To find the class photo, parents had to peel off this top layer, the back of which contained the road safety education advice.

Daniel Perez, creative director, Serviceplan France, commented, “We wanted to highlight – in the most impactful way – the terrible figure of 30 children injured or killed on their way or back to school each year in the Parisian area. We thought that nothing would better illustrate the scale of this figure than the image of an empty classroom.”