It cost €820k... but will this road safety advert save any lives?
Doubts over effectiveness compared to shock adverts
THE Road Safety Authority has been urged to reconsider how it spends taxpayers’ money after it paid out over €800,000 on a single ad campaign last year.
In the last two months of 2023, the RSA advert ran on the airwaves and online, promoting its 30kph campaign.
Shot in Clonakilty in west Cork, the ad features a motorist driving safely through the parish to a modified musical version of Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town.
The RSA says it raises awareness of how lowering the speed limit in urban areas can lead to safer, greener, more liveable towns and communities.
However, in response to a query by Kerry councillor Jackie HealyRae, the RSA confirmed the campaign cost a total of €819,686.
Production costs of the advertisement ran to €489,910.89 (ex vat), with media planning and buying adding another €315,057.72 to the bill, in addition to €14,717.40 spent on public relations.
‘It is anticipated the campaign will run for a minimum of four years and it is already back on air this month,’ the RSA said in its reply. ‘The creative agency behind the campaign is In The Company Of Huskies and the media buying agency is Spark Foundry.’
Cllr Healy-Rae has questioned
Invested in ‘more practical way’
the amount of money spent on the campaign and believes it should have been invested in ‘a more practical way’ to prevent road deaths.
‘A TV advert that costs this amount of money, shown briefly, cannot have the same impact as local initiatives throughout schools and workplaces, where we need to get the message out more effectively,’ he said.
‘I feel that, with the rise in deaths recorded in 30km areas, along with the continued rise in pedestrian deaths across Ireland, we need to focus on more safety features locally. These could include better signage, more pedestrian crossings or faster repairs to roads for the safety of pedestrians and cyclists.’
There have been 40 fatalities so far on Irish roads in 2024, the same number killed up to March 12 last year. A total of 184 people died in 173 fatal collisions in 2023, a rise of 29 compared to 2022.
Included in these fatalities were 44 pedestrians, the highest recorded since 2011.
This increase in fatalities has prompted Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to call for a return of shocking road safety adverts. ‘I think one thing we’ll have to reinitiate is a very strong public advertising campaign,’ he said in August. ‘I know a lot of people didn’t like those shock ads of the past, but I do think they were effective.’
Assistant Marketing Professor Julie Schiro said last year that Mr Varadkar’s comment is both right and wrong.
‘Fear is a really important motivator to change behaviour,’ she said. ‘But getting people to believe that fear and believe they are at risk is really difficult.
‘With fear-based advertising in particular, there’s always that risk that people are going to discount or outright reject the message because it is just too terrifying.’
In one of those memorable adverts, which was entitled Could you live with the shame?, a young boy is seen happily playing in his garden when, suddenly, and without warning, he is mown down by a car which crashes through the garden fence. The driver was drunk.
This was the work of David Lyle and Julie Anne Bailie, the creative team who have been working on road-safety campaigns in Northern Ireland since 1995 and in the Republic since the following year.
But clearly that had an impact on the public. Official Garda figures show that there were 472 road deaths in 1997, which gradually reduced to 376 by 2002.
However, questions are still being raised about whether such ads, in general, have a real impact at all. In 2009, during the downturn, the RSA’s safety budget was slashed by over 80% to €1million.
In 2009 there were 41 fewer deaths (238) compared to 2008. Nevertheless, the RSA insists its safety campaigns are worth the money.
Road Safety Minister Jack Chambers said there will soon be a major rise in safety campaigns.
A Government review is expected to sanction a big increase in cash for the RSA in next year’s budget.
The authority has already been authorised to spend an extra €5.6million which had been lying in reserves to ramp up campaigns and to review the driving test.
Labour’s transport spokesman Duncan Smith warned the authority needs a ‘transfusion of purpose’, while the Social Democrats transport spokeswoman Catherine Murphy said that the State agency needs to find a way to ‘communicate with the TikTok generation’.
She said last month: ‘It is especially important they [campaigns] occur on the platforms used by young people... We need to be targeting TikTok and other youth platforms.
‘We need to be having conversations with people on the forums they use to talk to people.
‘We do also need to visibly increase resources and support for road traffic policing. Deterrents have to be seen,’ Ms Murphy added.
‘Communicate with TikTok generation’