Ad of the Day: South African road safety ad darkly twists humans’ inability to walk and text
The Western Cape Government in South Africa has released a hard-hitting road safety ad that juxtaposes the hilarity of people bumping into things while texting with the fatal consequences of checking your phone at the wheel.
#ItCanWait
The bulk of the #ItCanWait spot features phone-related mishaps filmed on CCTV – a woman walking into a bus stop, a man falling into a pond – accompanied by circus music.
After a line reads: ‘You can’t even text and walk’, the film cuts to a young woman texting while driving. The music cuts as she hits another vehicle and is violently injured through being thrown around the car.
The screen then reads: ‘So why do you text and drive?’
The government’s Safely Home road safety division identified the need for a separate campaign around texting at the wheel after speaking to young people in the province, who theorised WhatsApp in particular to be a cause of driver distraction.
“We have been looking closely at WhatsApp as the next big thing for social media, but it was these township kids who alerted us to the safety implications for the developing world of a free, platform-agnostic text messaging app with rich media capabilities,” the authority said in a statement. “The bottom line of the situation is that the concept of multi-tasking is a dangerous myth.”