Romania is the European country with the highest number of death caused by road accidents, yet, in 2014, despite all efforts made by the police, 6 out of 10 Romanian drivers don’t wear their seatbelts.

The Romanian Automobile Club(ACR) wanted to change this and asked for our help. Without any media budget, we needed to leverage both social media and traditional PR to drive awareness and engagement, and affect behavior change. But how to make seatbelts hard to ignore in a country where everybody ignores seatbelts?

Simple: we stopped talking to everybody, and focused on the more cautious half of the target (the women) and offered them a new reason to wear seatbelts. #seatbeltb00bing - our hashtag encouraged women drivers to take selfies while wearing seatbelts and upload them to social media. More and more local celebrities and several TV stations joined the initiative and urged others to do the same.

Overnight, from an ignored item, seatbelts became the trendiest and the most talked about accessory to wear in Romania and not only. Our campaign made headlines on Euronews, CBS, Yahoo and GQ, amongst others. From the US to Thailand and from Mexico to Japan, it was for the first time a Romanian PSA spread this far and wide. With $0 media spent, we’ve reached 7 million Romanians, generated $492K worth of free media and 197.405.629 media impressions, making #seatbeltb00bing the number 1 cause related hashtag in Romania.

Based on over 800 relevant Google Street View scenarios, the ACR instructors formulated hundreds of questions, transforming them into exam tests.

The website engine picks those places from the Google Street View API to randomly generate test questions, in the official exam format.

That’s not all. As a collaborative, crowd-sourced component, on the website, people can also flag traffic fails or unusual situations found on Google Street View, and the ACR instructors will turn them into new exam questions. Google Maps becomes a crowd-sourced, global traffic education tool.

In the first 3 weeks after launch:

The project granted ACR a place all over prime time news on national TV, national and international media (321 articles + coverage on the 7 main TV Romanian stations)

Media and driving school students unanimously declared Street View Tests as “better, more relevant than those used by the Police”

248% increase in Facebook fans

52% increase in sign-ups for the ACR Driving School compared to the previous month

Initiative selected by the International Automobile Federation, in order to be implemented in other countries.

Project picked by the official Google Creative Sandbox selection.