By Steve Hawkes
BBC News Online |
A harrowing video showing the devastation caused by road crashes is to be shown to 600,000 pupils and students aged between 17 and 21. The 15-minute film, Too Young To Die, opens with the words: "Imagine losing someone you love suddenly and violently."
It features an interview with a mother who lost her 12-year-old son, and a young man cradling a dying friend in his arms. It also includes graphic police videos and photos of fatal crashes and their victims.
"Hard-hitting is the way to go - people become immune to facts and figures," says Simon Collister, of Brake, the road safety charity that produced the film.
Yet the facts speak for themselves. Young people are most at risk on the UK's roads. Of the 10 people who die in traffic accidents every day, four are aged under 25.
Many teenagers feel invulnerable and tend to take risks. They're also the hardest age group for road safety campaigners to reach.
Switch off
Previous campaigns have featured road safety officers making lengthy speeches to camera, Mr Collister told BBC News Online.
"There is nothing worse than lecturing young drivers - it is a turn-off. We wanted to make a clean break, and produce something that was not like all the others."
Thus the graphic campaign.
 Too fast to stop? |
"Young people are used to seeing horror films on TV, so this is the ideal way to make them listen because it is real life. They will not want to suffer as other as have suffered." Roger Vincent, of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, says young road users need a harsh dose of reality as computer games that "glorify road accidents" have left some with a distorted image of the consequences.
The increasing number of roadside shrines, where bereaved families and friends mark the spot of a fatality with crosses or bouquets of flowers, serve as stark reminders of the impact an accident can have, he says.
Scared safe
Others are less confident that the message will get through - bad drivers tend to be convinced that they're good drivers, says the AA Motoring Trust's head of road safety, Andrew Howard.
 |  If you start worrying the girlfriend, that might place pressure on the driver  |
"It may be very successful in scaring a timid 17-year-old who has just past his driving test, but really bad drivers will not take any notice. "And there is an immense relationship between young drivers who think they are good drivers and those who have accidents. They will say, 'I only had an accident because someone else pulled in front of me' - not realising they may have been driving too fast."
The most successful road safety campaigns are those that target not the drivers but the people who may be in the car with them.
"If you start worrying the girlfriend, that might start placing pressure on the driver."
Shock tactics
Advertising agency Lyle Bailie International makes hard-hitting road safety ads for broadcast in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, Italy and Israel.
 A still from Shame |
One ad, Shame, shows a car with a drunken driver at the wheel. The vehicle crashes through a fence, killing a child playing football in his garden. "They are very graphic - but that is they way they have to be," executive creative director Julie Anne Bailie says, as the target audience of 17-to-25-year-olds are ad-literate and cynical.
"Their whole reason for being is about freedom, independence and control, and they do not relate to metaphors or abstract symbolism."
But do the images work? Ms Bailie says that research has shown the ads have produced the highest ever seat-belt wearing rate in Northern Ireland.
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