What if you were invited to your own funeral?

Millenials are part of the generation that don’t respect speed limits at all. They don’t drive as fast as their Gen X and baby boomer counterparts, who typically have faster and more powerful cars. Gen Y just speed all the time, whether it’s going 45 km/h in a school zone as well as 85km/h in the tunnels. Most of them know this, but they still choose to act unsafe. The aim of the campaign was to have a psychological impact so they would adopt a new, safe way of driving.

Based on research and market studies, we’ve established a very effective yet simple strategy: the institutions (like BIVV/IBSR) do not have a lot of power, especially towards Gen Y, so we decided to use Gen Y’s friends and family to spread our message. We wanted to surprise young people by inviting them to their own funeral. The message was strong.

We created a website which let people send an email to a friend. Nothing unusual, except that the content of it was sent six months later. The recipient was therefore invited to slow down to be alive in six months.

Within 48 hours, we covered almost all Belgian media. The following week, we noted a record number of reviews over 400 websites that talked about the campaign and about fifteen television stations that had shown the video and commented on it. Gen Y massively shared the video on social networks.

With a measly media campaign budget of just € 633.61, we had a return on earned media of € 8.8 million, just for Belgium, which adds up to a return of investment of 14000%! On top of that, we reached more than 80% of our target in less than 48 hours.

The campaign won 4 Eurobest 2014 awards and the
Gouden Welp award for the best Belgian spot in 2014.