12 Sep 08

The Scottish Government Road Safety - Xbox Live

Creating a bespoke media platform to directly reach young men in Scotland

Background 
 
Government statistics showed that approximately 1 in 5 Scottish drivers has driven over the limit. Drink driving still accounts for around 30 fatalities and 170 injuries on Scotland’s roads every year. Further research identified young Scottish men aged 17-25 as having a particular propensity to drink drive. They viewed the risk of getting caught as being so negligible as to be nearly non-existent. The usual rules did not apply to them, and therefore to this campaign.

In the face of such stark findings, the brief was simple: get the “Drink Drive. Lose licence. Don’t risk it” message to reach our core target of young men across Scotland. We knew that the traditional media channels available to us in Scotland were becoming less and less effective at communicating with this hard-to-reach audience. We thought we needed to ‘think outside the box’ for our solution. As chance would have it, we found our solution ‘in the box’. X-box.

The Big Idea 

Create a bespoke media platform to directly reach young men in Scotland.

We knew that 68% of men under 24 had game consoles in the home and gaming was now part of their everyday routine so were eager to make the possibility of targeting young Scottish men a reality. But digital technology is so embedded in young people’s lives that it has become ubiquitous. Our media approach was to be as bold as them and follow their lead into digital media via a bespoke online gaming platform. What was different about this online gaming platform was that it was exclusively IP-targeted to Scotland. This is something which had never been done before.

Making It Happen

We approached MSN’s Massive with our big idea and worked with them to design an IP-based campaign to reach our young Scottish audience. Launched on Christmas Eve 2007, the campaign solely targeted young Scots as they played Xbox Live online, appearing in games such as EA’s Need for Speed Pro Speed, EA’s Need for Speed Carbon and Microsoft Games Studio’s Project Gotham Racing.

This was a brave new move for online gaming and we required evaluation from the undertaking so a Continental research study was also included as part of the project.

Results

We learned that gamers were highly receptive to the drink drive message with research findings from Continental revealing that 16-24 year olds in Scotland who saw the activity were 3 times more likely to re-call the “Drink Drive. Lose Licence. Don’t Risk It” tagline. Nearly three quarters of those polled recalled the in-game activity and said they were more likely to agree with the tagline.

As well as showing impact, the campaign generated a major PR ripple effect across Scotland and beyond, generating well over £100,000 worth of PR coverage .Within a few days of launch there were BBC reports, press coverage, and a massive online pick up with hundreds of links on Google News and online blog debates. All this from a media budget of just £10,000.

The success of this media first has paved the way for future regionally targeted online gaming activity opening the door to reach a youth market.