PURPOSE: Create a national conversation about the dangers of texting while driving.

IMPORTANCE: The use of mobile phones while driving has become so ubiquitous that consciousness of the risks has declined. Texting while driving increases the likelihood of a crash by three times, killing 3,328 people and injuring 387,000 in 2012. One group in particular, young female drivers ages 18-34, text with alarming frequency.

BACKGROUND: How do you reach young female drivers with a message they already know and don't really want to hear? You do something powerful, something dark and something that will go viral. These are smart people – they know it can kill them. However, the risk of dying isn't as powerful as their feeling of constantly needing to be on the phone for fear of missing out. So the U.S. DOT created the first national texting while driving campaign, U Text U Drive U Pay.

Our strategy and rationale was four-fold:

1. To change behavior, we first had to start a conversation. And most conversations among these young drivers happen online around hashtags. So we created a simple hashtag with a common call-to-action: #JustDrive.

2. To start a conversation, we had to have a conversation piece – the creative. So we created something powerful, something dark, something that would go viral on digital channels. The result is an atypical government-sponsored message.

3. To keep the conversation going, we layered in peer-to-peer communication with original, peer-to-peer #JustDrive video content featuring YouTube Stars Rhett & Link and What’s Up Elle. We engaged with Twitter to sponsor #JustDrive and the curation of the hashtag’s user-generated content.

4. To make the conversational actionable, we accessed the hottest, most social content on the web by partnering with BuzzFeed to create key pieces of #JustDrive sharable posts.

- Broadcast TV spot named world’s top commercial week it aired by Adweek.

- Spot went viral – value of impressions from earned and social media tallied $25 million, nearly tripling paid media budget.

- Twitter reports it was best-performing non-profit campaign, with #JustDrive trending nationally, reaching 33.6 million users in just nine days; promoted Tweet campaign tripled average non-profit engagement rate benchmark of 2.32% by achieving 7.40% engagement rate.

- Google reports digital video “Textpert” was best-performing government-sponsored message in history, making its Top Ten Leaderboard for April 2014 (8 million views to-date).

- Google Display Networks reports digital advertising campaign broke all click-through records for government-sponsored campaigns.

- Campaign has received over 13 million views on YouTube and was featured in Huffington Post, TIME.com, Yahoo! and Mashable.

- Brands and celebrities adopted used #JustDrive hashtag (AT&T, YouTube, Cars.com, UPS, Health Magazine, AAA, Consumer Reports, Olivia Munn, Hannah Hart).