In Belgium, In 2017, 640 people lost their lives in a road accident. That’s a decrease of 13% compared to 2016. Good news. At least, for the statistics that is. Because for the 640 parents, friends and other relatives of each one of the victims, it’s pure tragedy

Brief: How can we illustrate the fact that 640 dead people dying on the road is still way too much in a country as small as Belgium. How can we get beyond the statistics? How can we turn each road victim, each lost child, into a reason to drive more carefully.

‘Behind the numbers’. A year-long radio campaign you’d rather not hear. Because every time it airs somebody just died in traffic. In real-time. One adapted and unique radio spot for each road victim. Minutes after it happened. Since early January, till end of the year. Every day again, unfortunately. Every time somebody dies in traffic. Making every victim, every number in the statistics, more tangible. To illustrate the scale of the problem to everybody listening to the radio, mostly while driving. By doing so, the organization ‘Parents of Road Victims’ wants to turn each lost life into a reason to drive more carefully. Each unique spot was recorded by real parents of road victims.

Behind the numbers is a year-long, real-time, radio campaign that took off early January and that will keep airing updated spots till the end of the year. The media plan is directly connected to real-time police data, 24h a day. So every time somebody gets killed in traffic, an updated radio spot airs. Instantly. On 5 different radio channels at the same time. Meaning that each of the channels gets the update minutes after the road victim gets into the official ‘national road victims’ police data. That police data gets updated every hour and links back to the 5 radio stations that agreed on this unique media planning.

This radio campaign is directly linked and completely depending on real-time National Police data. The national Police opened up its data specifically for 5 radio stations, in order to allow ‘Parents of Road Victims’ in real-time to turn each lost life into a radio spot and a reason to drive more carefully. Concrete: March 15th, at 10.22am a young man died in traffic. Number 66 since january 1st. At 11am an updated radio spot about number 66 who just died was live on the the radio. Later that evening number 67 and 68 died. Two new victims. Two new radiospots. Two new messages to make people drive more carefully.

The campaign started early January 2018 and will last till end of the year. The big advantage of this campaign is that it’s not one of those one-off sensibilisation campaigns. This a long term plan to turn each victim into a radio ad, urging you to drive more carefully, likely reaching you while in traffic. This radio campaign will have as many spots and as many appearances as there will be people dying in traffic. It’s difficult to prove the correlation, but in the first 6 months of 2018 numbers of people dying in traffic are at an all-time low. Let’s cross fingers for the second half.