Consumers are bombarded with thousands of messages every day. In order to enable the message of road safety to stand out of this media clutter, Street Cred Media has partnered with the Gauteng department of community safety, to add a new dimension to the department’s educational drive to reduce the carnage on the province’s roads.
This has resulted in the introduction of a form of ‘shock therapy’ by placing 25 wrecked vehicles in strategic positions throughout Gauteng as a means of educating people about the importance of obeying the rules of the road.
“As a way of capturing the public’s attention, the Gauteng Department of Community Safety have embarked on a campaign of shock advertising until the end of April 2015 to heighten awareness of the consequences of negligent driving, placing the wreckages at hazardous locations such as Golden Highway, Moloto Road and major arterioles such as the R59, N12, N3 and N14, known for their dangerous and often fatal accidents,” says Garth Maluleke, managing director of Street Cred Media. ‘… we are using the impact of shock advertising as leverage to encourage road safety.”
The Gauteng department of community safety is responsible for both traffic law enforcement and providing information on road safety. It said the aim of the campaign was to “combine law enforcement with education, using these wrecks to both appeal to the moral consciousness of each road user and to challenge each of them as to whether or not they want to contribute to the statistics of fatal wreckages? In this way we are using outdoor shock advertising with an edge as part of our road safety endeavours”.
This safety project is part of a global initiative called the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 Campaign, launched in more than 100 countries including South Africa.
