Touch, Lebanon’s leading mobile operator, takes an active role in raising awareness on texting and driving. Each year, it runs its DON’T TEXT AND DRIVE campaign with its partner Yasa, an NGO for road safety.

In Lebanon, people are generally immune to the dramatics of public safety messages. This challenge to reach the public was seen as an opportunity to position touch as a fresh and modern communicator that can approach a sensitive topic in a positive way that’s not only entertaining but also effective.

That is why we turned to branded content, Lebanon is generally liberal in its TV programming and viewership is high. So to effectively reach a mass audience we partnered with a celebrity chef, a pop star, an actor, a news anchor, a celebrity fitness instructor, a celebrity musician, a celebrity hairstylist and a celebrity dance instructor to take part in a live game show to send the message across effectively.

In general, people are immune to the dramatics of public safety messages. So, how can we convince them that texting actually impairs driving…or anything else? In order to effectively reach an unconcerned audience we put the theory to the test by partnering with their celebrity icons and challenged them to text while doing what they do best on a 2-min live game show called TEXT IF YOU CAN.

And at the end of every episode, each celebrity related back their failure to the dangers of texting and driving in a personal message to their fans.

Over 3 weeks, the show aired on primetime across all TV stations. Fans immediately picked up on it and so did the media. The celebrities were interviewed on the most popular TV programs.

As a reaction to the campaign, Lebanon’s most popular news anchor opened primetime news while texting…and dedicated 20-minutes to it. Even the top-rated social program took the “text if you can!” challenge to the ground. Inviting people to play a car game while texting.

Public safety messages are just that, a message to everyone. In order to effectively reach everyone, we invited 8 celebrities from different fields - A celebrity chef, a pop star, an actor, a news anchor, a celebrity fitness instructor, a celebrity musician, A celebrity hairstylist and a dance instructor – and each of them played the game and addressed the message to their fans.

The campaign received over 352,293 online views (to date), 4,376,967 million impressions (to date), more than $2.6 million dollars in earned media, and over $2 million in PR value.

But more importantly, Touch and Yasa delivered a serious message in an entertaining way that effectively reached 70% of the population (2,836,177 from a population of 4 million).

In general, people are immune to the dramatics of public safety messages. So, how can we convince them that texting actually impairs driving…or anything else? In order to effectively reach an unconcerned audience we put the theory to the test by partnering with their celebrity icons and challenged them to text while doing what they do best on a 2-min live game show called TEXT IF YOU CAN.

And at the end of every episode, each celebrity related back their failure to the dangers of texting and driving in a personal message to their fans.