In 2011, 25% of all driving accidents in Australia were affected by mobile phone use, mainly by drivers aged 18-35. This audience has a mind-set of "it won't happen to me", and is resistant to messages from the government. The brief from Vic Roads was to reduce the incidence of mobile phone related driving accidents, without the use of advertising. The insight was that young people listen to their friends advice more than anyone else. How could this be capitalised on?

The idea was to create Road Mode- a new function that both deactivates all incoming calls and SMS messages on your mobile phone whilst activated. Ingeniously, when people call or text you, they receive an automated text message from your phone that educates them of the dangers of driving while on the phone.

In this way, each Road Mode message becomes an ad for road safety- automatically creating digital PR every single time Road Mode was switched on by any user.

Driving whilst being distracted by a mobile phone is one of the biggest growing problems in society, particularly in younger drivers. And this part of society is resistant to governmental messaging- their peers are the people they listen to.

So, rather than another governmental message, we took the opposite tactic- generating peer-to-peer direct messaging where the road safety message was generated by friends.

Because each message sent by Road Mode has a link to download the app, each message becomes a direct communication to get the Road Mode.

After 6 weeks, as at 16 April, 2013, Road Mode has been used almost 6,000 times (5,845 to be exact) for an average of 26 minutes and 3 seconds on each occasion. That's a total of 2,550 hours of Road Mode being activated and sending peer-to-peer road safety messages across Victoria.

Currently, it is rated at an average score of 4.30 out of 5 on the GooglePlay store.

At the time of writing, 16 April 2013, the road toll in Victoria is down 14.3% year on year.