Volkswagen supports the highest standards for safety on the road. An alarming figure by The Telegraph reported half a million car crashes in the UK are caused by women applying make-up while driving. We believed that it was time to raise awareness of this inconspicuous danger.

The goal of the campaign was to educate female drivers on the dangers of applying make-up while driving. Our idea was to place our message exactly where women spend time thinking about “make-up”: Haul channels. The videos on these channels consist of ordinary girls, who buy cosmetics followed by an online make-up tutorial. Together with a famous haul girl, Nikkie, with over 240,000 subscribers and over 36 million views, we created a tutorial carrying our warning message.

The video began like any other of her videos, narrating as she applies make-up, until she is suddenly flung towards the camera as if she had been in a car accident.

We uploaded the video solely to Nikkie’s Youtube channel and it has since proliferated to other major social networks such as Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and Facebook. Without seeding, without one euro of media spend, our video had over

1.5 million views, thousands of re-tweets, blog posts and PR around the world. Thousands of comments prove that we haven’t just come up with a surprising viral, but we’ve really got women thinking that life’s not worth risking – even for the most beautiful make-up.