The city of Antwerp wanted to remind people about the importance of safe and slow driving in the city centre. Since we all want people to drive careful in our own street, we created a campaign in which local residents could participate.

We all know the speeding signs that display either a happy or a sad ‘smiley face’, depending on the speed limit. Let’s take these ‘happy and sad faces’-speeding signs one step further by crowdsourcing real pictures from real local citizens. So we replaced the existing ‘smileys’ by crowdsourced selfies. Citizens were activated and invited to upload two photos of themselves: one with a happy face and one with a disapproving glare. The selfies were then shown on interactive billboards which react in real time to drivers’ speed. If passing drivers are within the speed limit, they’ll see the smiling selfie. If they exceed the limit, they’ll see the sad selfie.

After just a few days a total of 268 selfies were uploaded on the campaign website and were then displayed on the interactive billboards in the different neighbourhoods of Antwerp reaching thousands of motorists, to stop them from speeding.

75% of the target audience have seen the campaign and 63,1% of the target audience believes this campaign incites motorists to respect the speeding limits in the city centre. 77,2% find the campaign very useful and 75,9% finds it also very meaningful. (Soucre: City of Antwerp, Campaign measure online panel, October 2014)

We also had a lot of local and national media attention with the campaign. All major TV channels and newspapers picked up the story. Later followed by international press, leading to the roll-out of the Speeding Selfies in other countries in 2015.