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By Tony Hallett, 26 January 2006 09:00

COMMENT

What does a government public safety campaign have in common with 'happy slap' gangs? In this one case, a lot, says Tony Hallett.

I'm the editor of a publication that carries a lot of content about what people sometimes refer to as new media - the web, mobile, interactive TV and so on - and also the public sector. So I am encouraged to see a government campaign, currently appearing on UK TV screens for another run, that marries these two subjects well.

Many readers will know about the Department of Transport's THINK! Road safety initiative. It covers several angles - looking out for motorcyclists or avoiding tiredness at the wheel, to name two - but there is a sub-campaign aimed at teenagers.

From the end of October last year, starting at cinemas and now on TV, we have seen ads that clearly address a teenage audience, a group which is especially susceptible to road accidents. How? The entire ad, I learn from the DoT website, not only looks like it is shot entirely using the video capability of a mobile phone but it was indeed created this way.

A group of teenagers are walking along, joking and laughing, maybe on their way home from school. Absent-mindedly, one of the group walks out between parked cars on what looks like an average residential city street. Bang! Without any build-up or warning a car runs over the boy who cartwheels into the air in what looks likes a fatal and brutal accident.

I'd love to know whether whoever shot this highly effective piece did so with an entire camera crew in tow but the bottom line is that the ad is very good. Its ending is truly strong.

The piece is available to view from the website - see this page. Apart from its placing there (purely for the likes of me, I'm guessing) and on screens elsewhere (for millions of teenagers), I first came across the piece as a viral email.

Now this is significant on several levels. First of all, I had no idea this was a government-sponsored road safety campaign at that time. It looked like a (mobile) video nasty, hard-hitting in every sense.

Second, these days virals - either full-on, calculated marketing messages or just something interesting that snowballs through email - normally signify that the media being distributed has hit a nerve. Whoever sent me the video over email (and I probably complained about the megabytes it was using up in my inbox at that point) wasn't aware of an effective road safety awareness campaign - they were voting for the short clip's impact.

We live in an age where violent crimes are often being recorded on video phones. Tabloid newspapers are full of headlines about 'happy slap' gangs, who capture violent assaults on their mobiles. And these stories outweigh those where a concerned onlooker or householder ultimately managed - through filming a crime - to help apprehend the bad guys to the police.

But these DoT ads have taken a medium that is very much at the fingertips of millions of teenagers now, kept the presentation of the subjects and issue suitably basic, and - I'm hoping this is the case here - created something that will have a meaningful effect.

Who said the public sector cannot use the latest technologies to become more effective? In this case we're even talking about sexy consumer tech, not your usual government IT initiative.

Tony Hallett is site director for silicon.com