A safe pair of hands

DESCRIPTION

Vodafone wanted to tackle the disheartening statistic that 6,000 people are killed and 35,000 are injured in road accidents every year in Egypt, with more than 40% of accidents attributed to human error. The mobile operator planned to promote responsible driving via a road safety campaign encouraging truck drivers to wear hands-free headsets if they needed to use their mobiles on the road.
Given the mindset of most truck drivers, Vodafone needed to avoid “preaching” to them. Rather, it wanted the communication to appear home-grown by truckers themselves, so they would actively participate in it.
The activity hijacked the popular ritual of drivers writing a few words of wisdom on the backs of their new vehicles as an emblem of ownership, many of the inscriptions being very insightful and local. Vodafone used this practice as a creative medium, inscribing sentences on vehicles with the same style of language encouraging drivers to wear headsets, an example being “Real drivers wear headsets”.
Drivers were offered free headsets in exchange for allowing Vodafone to place the truck sticker inscriptions on their vehicles. The stickers acted as mini mobile billboards, guaranteed to be read by anyone driving behind the vehicles.
The first edition of 10,000 printed messages, intended to sustain the whole summer season, ran out in the first 10 days. When Vodafone began printing the second edition, truck drivers themselves started to make their own versions of the messages.

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