aws2.campaignasia.comTAC road safety advertising (Victoria)
Also: If you drink, then drive, you're a bloody idiot · Transport Accident Commission road safety campaigns
“If you drink, then drive, you're a bloody idiot.”
Victoria's Transport Accident Commission has run graphic, emotional road-safety TV advertising since December 1989, paired with random breath testing, speed cameras and police enforcement. It is one of the longest continuous and most studied government road-safety advertising programmes.
- Years
- 1989–now
- Country
- Australia
- Topic
- AlcoholImpaired drivingTraffic safety
- Asks people to
- Stop
- Strategy
- Coined termFear appealPolicy paired
- Channel
- EventsTVWebsite
- Audience
- General publicMenYoung adultsVictorian drivers; young male drivers were the primary target of the drink-driving and speed campaigns studied by Tay.
Evidence
Quasi-experimentalMixed
Tay (2005a) re-analysed the data behind earlier, conflicting evaluations of Victoria's drink-driving enforcement and publicity and found the campaigns reduced serious crashes in high-alcohol hours, robust to model specification. Tay (2005b), focusing on young male drivers: drink-driving publicity had a significant independent effect on serious crashes (its interaction with enforcement was anti-complementary); speed publicity had no independent effect but its interaction with enforcement reduced crashes. Advertising effect cannot be separated from enforcement, which ran alongside it by design. Trade press claims of a 37% fall in the road toll in the first 12 months are not from an evaluation.
Sponsor (who paid)
- Transport Accident Commission (Victoria) Foreign government, funder and creator
Credits (who made it)
- Grey Melbourne Creative, 1989-2013 source
- Clemenger BBDO Melbourne Creative, 2013- source
Executions (individual ads)
- Everybody Hurts (20-year montage) 2009 · tv
- Everybody hurts when you speed 2010 · tv
- Towards Zero: Then and Now 2015 · tv
- Meet Graham 2016 · events
- The Lucky Ones Get Caught 2021 · tv
Related campaigns
- Mistakes 2014
- Legend ('Ghost Chips') 2011
Sources
- Tay R. Drink driving enforcement and publicity campaigns: are the policy recommendations sensitive to model specification? Accid Anal Prev 2005;37(2):259-66 evaluation · 2005 · DOI 10.1016/j.aap.2004.10.001 · PMID 15667812
- Tay R. The effectiveness of enforcement and publicity campaigns on serious crashes involving young male drivers: are drink driving and speeding similar? Accid Anal Prev 2005;37(5):922-9 evaluation · 2005 · DOI 10.1016/j.aap.2005.04.010 · PMID 15925317
- Transport Accident Commission (Wikipedia) reference
- Mumbrella: Clemenger Melbourne holds onto TAC account (2019) news · 2019
- Mumbrella: 25 years of the TAC (2012) news · 2012
- TAC media release: Prestigious international award for TAC ad (17 May 2010) sponsor · 2010
Research notes
Credits fetched from source pages 2026-10-22. First TAC ad aired 10 December 1989 (TAC release). 'Coined-term' refers to 'bloody idiot' entering Australian vernacular; reconsider if too loose. Earlier MUARC (Monash) evaluations by Cameron, Newstead and colleagues in the 1990s are the ones Tay re-analysed; not in PubMed, add from MUARC reports. 'Meet Graham' (2016) is a crash-survivability education piece, not a behaviour ask. Safe-messaging: n/a.
Record cases/tac-road-safety-advertising.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign