When you have kids in the car, you drive that much safer. But let’s be honest here, most Malaysians are a little more careless when they’re driving alone. In fact, while we were mining for insights, we found out that 9 out of 10 drivers agree that they drive safer with kids in their car.

Now the last thing the world needs, is another GPS app. With 1.4 million users on Waze, working with them was the best way for scale our idea.

So we created the world’s first kid-sourced GPS voicepack on waze – the Maxis Safe Mode voicepack.

We worked with waze via google hangouts to craft the reads for the voicepack. It took 3 months of testing and prototyping to launch the voicepack.

In the meantime, we seeded promotions to create awareness of the campaign.

Content was pushed to video feeds. There was a festive film on national TV to promote safe driving via the voicepack. We also bought banners on the Waze app. Specifically the ‘zero speed banner’ where the banner pops up the moment the car draws to a stop so that users can click to download immediately.

The response was so good that Waze decided to make the voicepack available worldwide, which definitely raised awareness of our campaign and transformed the safe driving initiative from a local idea to a global one.

Safe Mode generated a total PR value of over USD 14 million, and even got featured on NBC, Today Show and Bloomberg.

It was so popular Waze made it available worldwide and the largest number of users outside of Malaysia were Americans.

The voicepack has been downloaded 677,100 times to date. With 1.4 million active Malaysian Waze users, that's 1 out of 2 Malaysians using our voicepack.

Maxis brand health tracking showed that scores on 'data quality', 'innovation' and 'digitally driven' have improved as compared to competitors.

We still get emails from parents around the world asking to have their kids featured in the next edition of the voicepack.

Most voicepacks are frivolous. Usually celebrity and brand tie-ins that entertain drivers. We wanted a voicepack that actually made a difference.

The campaign was broken into 3 parts.

Part 1: call-to-action.

We used social video promotions to push our project to the public to invite volunteers to join our project.

Part 2: the utility

To promote usage, we launched the voicepack and used PR and content films to create awareness. How-to steps were also included in every piece of communication. The organic spread of the idea also helped with the downloads.

Part 3: Festive push

The largest amount of road fatalities happen during festive season. We created a special Hari Raya film to remind parents to drive safer and download the voicepack. The traditional greeting of ‘Selamat Hari Raya’ – Happy Hari Raya was reworded into ‘Hari Raya Selamat’ – A safe Hari Raya.

Situation

Maxis wanted to shed its image as a traditional voice-oriented telco and use the internet to improve lives.

Brief

Smartphone-usage contribute to road accident statistics. How can an Internet company help make a difference?

Objectives

Position Maxis as an internet brand that understands and utilizes the Internet for good.