For its latest campaign, the Transport Accident Commission (TAC) has directly targeted users of social media, with a particular focus on reaching younger drivers, who continue to be over-represented in road trauma.
Created by Melbourne digital agency Loud&Clear, TAC’s “Best In Slow” campaign sees a production team responding to users who’ve tagged images of their pets through the #bestinslow tag on Twitter, Vine and Instagram. Within a few minutes, the user’s pet is the star of a quirky, personalised animated song with a subtle reference to “taking it slow”.
Loud&Clear head of content Joel Beath said: “We wanted to do something friendly, a bit quirky and unique for TAC’s social campaign. People love posting pictures of their pets online and, hashtags like #dogsofinstagram have hundreds of thousands of followers, we thought, why not find a way to use the popularity of these hashtags, and how much people love their pets to get a message across?”
TAC head of community relations Joe Calafiore said this new online venture was an alternative way of encouraging people to stick to the speed limit. “Pets to most of us are like family and don’t want to see their loved ones get hurt. #bestinslow is a light-hearted approach to getting people to stop and think about their behaviour on the road, with a serious message that speed kills,” he said.
Speeding is one of the biggest killers on our roads with excessive or inappropriate speeding contributing to around one in three road deaths in Victoria.
The #bestinslow playlist has been specifically designed to cater for this with tracks based on those from artists like Kanye West and LMFAO, but the catalogue can also suit older generations and their pets with inspirations ranging from Fleetwood Mac to The Eagles.
