My son came home for Thanksgiving Tuesday night. 20 minutes out of Columbus his tire blew. T and I picked him up. The next day, I drove him back to his car to meet the tow truck which took his car to the tire shop. Anyway, along the drive to and from Columbus, ODOT's safety message gave drivers thought to keep safe.
 |
| Photo: ODOT |
Friday we took off for Chicago to spend the weekend with our daughters and on the approach to Chicago the Illinois DOT greeted us with its safety message:
Messages that tie into pop culture or something people can relate to is a way to get the importance of safety out the and hopefully change driver behavior. If these messages help people pay attention, slow down, and make sure they’re buckled, that's what matters.
America is experiencing a rise in traffic deaths and the effectiveness of witty signs is up for debate. States love them. It earns DOTs some fun publicity and even occasional notoriety on social media. Plus it seems like making a message witty, topical, or full of puns should be better at grabbing drivers’ attention. One study even shows that such messaging causes more activity in the reader’s brain than a simple message like Don’t Drink And Drive. Funny signs might make a boring chore like freeway driving more entertaining, but if it’s not making us more safe, then studies will need to be done to measure the signs' effectiveness.
I was speaking in Nebraska last month, and the audience was about half awake, and I thought of the most outrageous case I could think of, a public guardians office that had a designated pornography buyer. That snapped them out of the stupor, and I explained why, and how what they were doing was both legal, and resolved a problem of their clients being arrested for shoplifting. Then I said, people remember the funny or outrageous story, tell it, and tie it into your message, and people will remember the message.
ReplyDelete