2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

In general, people are immune to the dramatics of public safety messages. So, when Touch, Lebanon’s leading mobile operator and YASA, an NGO for road safety came to us to communicate their annual “Don’t text and drive” campaign, we knew we couldn't go forth with a regular campaign. In order to effectively reach an unconcerned audience we had to speak their language. So,we sent the message across through their favorite celebrities. We created entertaining content based on the scientific fact MULTI-TASKING IS A MYTH. We introduced TEXT IF YOU CAN a live game show that proves that when you text, you can’t focus on anything else. We produced 8 episodes challenging celebrities from various fields to text and do what they do best…If they stopped either task…they lost. Using gaming lingo, we compared the dangers of the road with 3 lives…of course, they all failed. And at the end of every episode, each celebrity related back their failure to the dangers of texting and driving in a personal message to their fans.Over 3 weeks, the game show aired on primetime across all TV stations.

Results

In Lebanon, people are generally immune to the dramatics of public safety messages. So how can Yasa, an NGO for road safety, and touch, Lebanon’s leading mobile operator, effectively send a serious message like “DON’T TEXT AND DRIVE” to an unconcerned audience? By creating entertaining content based on the scientific fact: Multi-tasking is a MYTH. We introduced TEXT IF YOU CAN: A LIVE GAME SHOW that proves that when you text, you can’t focus on anything else. We produced 8 episodes challenging celebrities from various fields (of which they all did pro-bono) to text and do what they do best…if they stopped either task…they lost. Using gaming lingo we compared the dangers of the roads with 3 lives…of course, they all failed. And at the end of every episode, each celebrity related back their failure to the dangers of texting and driving in a personal message to their fans. Over 3 weeks, the show aired on primetime across all TV stations. Fans immediately picked up on it and so did the media. The celebrities were interviewed on the most popular TV programs. As a reaction to the campaign, Lebanon’s most popular news anchor opened primetime news while texting…and dedicated a documentary to it. Even the top-rated social program took the “text if you can!” challenge to the ground by inviting people to play a car game while texting.

Public safety messages are just that, a message to everyone. In order to effectively reach everyone, we invited 8 celebrities from different fields - A celebrity chef, a pop star, an actor, a news anchor, a celebrity fitness instructor, a celebrity musician, A celebrity hairstylist and a dance instructor – and each of them played the game and addressed the message to their fans.

The campaign received over 352,293 online views (to date), 4,376,967 million impressions (to date), more than $2.6 million dollars in earned media, and over $2 million in PR value. But more importantly, Touch and Yasa delivered a serious message in an entertaining way that effectively reached 70% of the population (2,836,177 from a population of 4 million).