Is it necessary to use violent or heartbreaking images in trafficking campaigns? Is that hardness effective? Experts believe not, because even if they are more impressive, not all of them have the desired result: generating responsible behavior behind the wheel.
“Kind” campaigns, on the contrary, are perceived by drivers as a constructive recommendation. That is, they accept that what they see can be useful on a personal level and, therefore, they are more effective.
These are the main conclusions of the study Evaluation of traffic and safety campaigns, which have been presented by the Mapfre Foundation and Bitbrain and which has been prepared after a scientific analysis of the reaction of 80 drivers in Zaragoza to 24 traffic campaigns -twelve harsh and twelve friendly-, both from the DGT and from other entities, including the Foundation itself.
To make the report, through a combined study of neuromarketing techniques and in-depth surveys, the impacts that traffic campaigns generate consciously and unconsciously in society have been measured.
The paper concludes that it does not seem necessary to use harsh campaigns: “Despite the fact that they generate a greater emotional impact than kind ones (at a conscious and unconscious level), this greater impact does not translate into a greater change in the perception of the danger of not complying traffic rules”.
According to experts, it is not necessary to resort to screams or images of broken families, blood on the road or glass heads. Those “violent and heartbreaking” elements that some traffic campaigns have shown and that “put the brain on tension” are not “as effective as believed to generate responsible behaviors behind the wheel.”
In any case, the report does make it clear that seeing all kinds of road safety campaigns causes people, without realizing it, to increase their perception of danger when they are reckless behind the wheel.
In the case of friendly campaigns, the increase is 6.6%, while in the case of harsh campaigns it is 5.7%, as confirmed by the results of the study. According to the study, both types “work to raise awareness” and have a greater effect than advertising campaigns on any other topic.
When images are shown that are too explicit in hard campaigns, high peaks of emotional impact are produced. “As a result, people generate a certain rejection of feeling identified with them and are more likely to think that, although it is true that they could be victims of an accident, it would not occur because of them,” say the experts.
In fact, they have observed that when a harrowing image is included, a peak of impact is achieved and, from that moment, “the brain raises cognitive barriers that produce a filter for the rest of the explicit images and no longer generates a response.” .
On the contrary, people perceive kind campaigns as a constructive recommendation, that is, they “accept that what they see can be useful on a personal level, and, therefore, they are more effective”.
It also concludes that close-ups of children are ideal for provoking a powerful emotional reaction in the audience, as well as the presence of a famous person in campaigns. Likewise, he recommends resorting to braking and acceleration noises, as well as images from before the accident, “since the brain is tense in anticipation of what is going to happen.”
