The Roads and Traffic Authority, NSW, Australia, has just launched an anti-speeding campaign aimed at young men, using the tagline Speeding. No one thinks big of you.
The 45 second TV ad features a young man burning rubber on a city street, hoping to impress the girls. However they’re not impressed. Instead of thumbs up, they show limp pinkies, using their little fingers to indicate the size of the speeding guy’s appendage and intelligence! The driver narrowly misses a female pedestrian. He gets the pinkie verdict from another woman who witnesses the incident. To top it off, the back seat passengers produce the pinkie verdict as the driver swerves his way around a street corner due to high speed.
The RTA has developed the campaign because many young guys see speeding as cool and all the ads in the world showing the serious injury and death that speeding can cause are becoming less effective. Young guys simply reject this message. They have an “it won’t happen to me” attitude.
The Speeding. No one thinks big of you campaign takes a totally different approach. It offers young drivers an immediate consequence: speed and people will think poorly of you. It purposely talks to young guys in their language.
This is a good idea and it’s well executed. The young target required appropriate language and messages but questions arises: are young people more interested in the size of their (little)johnson than safety and security? If so, maybe they should not drive at all.
We’re seeing a variation on the sex sells theme. Sexuality is one again the main theme for this campaign. I think I saw stuff like this before: campaign where product features, or companies’ services, were not cited at all; instead you could see half naked women holding the advertised products… or stuff like that.
People do care more about sex and sex appeal. They want to be either (sexually?) pleased by your product or not being damaged in reputation.
This is and Italian ad from the Wall Street Institute.
It translates like this: On summer english is free.
Let yourself be tempted by 3… months with us
Appeal to emotion is a logical fallacy which uses the manipulation of the recipient’s emotions, rather than valid logic, to win an argument.
…and if correctly applied, it works.