Those ads on TV - enough is enough

[Neeek]

I realize that there have been a couple of threads on here about people’s rather nasty experiences of witnessing car accidents in recent days (and yes, they are frighteningly horrible), so I’m hoping that we can all distinguish the difference between those threads and this one, which I’ve deliberately started so as not to have other threads veer off-topic.

I’m going to have a rant about those bloody ads on TV. You know the ones I’m talking about – perhaps the “Enough is Enough” tagline is QLD specific, but you know them as well as the next person.

Having working in advertising and marketing my whole life, I am well aware of what makes an advertising campaign successful. When you’re dealing with a specific product, you can attribute sales of said product to the advertisement and therefore measure its success. Sell more widgets as a direct result of the TV advertising, and provided the target is reached, the campaign is a success.

Road safety is not a product, I realize this. I also appreciate that the campaigns we see are more “awareness campaigns” than anything else, thus they are difficult to measure in terms of their effectiveness. What I object to is the shock-tactics employed. These ads are graphic, they are disturbing and they make me wince. I don’t like watching them and frequently look away when they come on. As such, what purpose do they actually serve? They are there to remind me that if I speed, or if I drive whilst I’m tired or having an argument with a passenger or using my mobile ‘phone whilst driving, there exists the possibility of me causing an accident that will result in death, dismemberment, grief, pain and suffering.

Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, knows that when you’re not concentrating on the matter at hand (driving), you open yourself and others up to risk. This is common sense, and anyone who disagrees with me on this matter deserves never to slip behind the wheel ever again. Given that I, like 99.9% of the population in this country, don’t WANT to have an accident, I keep these things in mind when I’m driving and do my best to avoid the sorts of scenarios that the ads target. No amount of shock-tactic advertising is going to change that because it is simply common sense, and whether I’ve seen an advertising campaign showing babies getting orphaned because a driver wasn’t paying attention or not, I drive the same – to the best of my ability, all of the time, as alert as I can be. I don’t drive drunk, I don’t answer my ‘phone, if I’m knackered I won’t get behind the wheel. Common sense.

I don’t see the point in these ads. We know that accidents happen – they always will, and that’s never a good thing. We would all like to think that should we become involved in one, it’ll never be our fault and the other driver will be to blame. But sometimes it WILL be our fault, and there’s no excuse for that. My point here is that a shocking advertising campaign won’t make any difference whatsoever.

The whole campaign is a waste of space. It makes us feel guilty about driving. It scares us into thinking that the next time we take the car out, we’re going to die or kill others. It turns the car, which I believe to be one of man’s greatest achievements, into a rusty butcher’s knife in the hands of a deranged and paranoid nutcase. There’s no need for that.

I want it to stop, and when it does, I want to review the road toll and show the government that nothing has changed. The campaign is deeply flawed, doesn’t work and is therefore a waste of money. Let’s spend it on the health system so that when I rock up to A&E in the back of an ambulance after having had a near fatal collision in my car (which no awareness campaign could have avoided) I won’t get turned away because there are no doctors to treat me.