A thought-provoking road safety campaign, which puts a clever twist on the need to ‘fill your tank’ before you drive, is the selected Re:act TAFE 2021 campaign in Victoria.
The ‘Rest, then drive – that energy drink won’t fill the tank’ message was devised by Holmesglen TAFE graphic design students Sasha Price and Carly Diep to raise awareness among young drivers of drowsy driving.
The campaign was created as part of the annual Re:act road safety behaviour change program, which challenges TAFE graphic design students to create a campaign that raises awareness among 16-24 year old road users, including apprentices, of a critical road safety issue. The 2021 topic was fatigue.
An initiative of strategic behaviour change agency Hard Edge, Re:act has been raising awareness and changing behaviour among young road users for several years, running in selected Australian universities since 2016. In 2021, the program grew to include TAFE students, with Holmesglen TAFE in Victoria, North Metropolitan TAFE in Western Australia and TAFE Queensland all running the program in the first half of the year.
Re:act founder Andrew Hardwick said selected Re:act TAFE campaigns would be developed for public execution via Re:act media partner oOh!media’s digital assets, including on TAFE campuses and in regional areas.
“The students from Holmesglen TAFE produced amazing work, and the selected campaign is an engaging combination of target audience research and brilliant thinking,” he said.
“We’re grateful for the support Holmesglen TAFE and program partners WorkSafe Victoria and the TAC provided the Re:act TAFE program. Importantly, not only does it produce a real-world safety campaign to change attitudes, research insights uncovered will help road and workplace safety agencies understand this hard to reach demographic and engage young people with safety messages.”
Sasha Price said the idea behind the students’ campaign was to relate filling up your car with fuel to ‘filling up’ your body with sleep, adding that participating in Re:act had raised her awareness about the risks of drowsy driving and changed her behaviour.
“Our campaign idea was to use a fuel gauge but you’re filling up on sleep instead of fuel,” she said. “What we wanted to put behind the campaign was the anxiety you feel when your fuel is getting low and convey the idea that you wouldn’t do that to yourself – you wouldn’t try to drive long distances on ‘empty’.
“When I was reading the statistics, I couldn’t believe that more people die from fatigued driving than drunk driving. We do speak about it a lot more now. We used to just brush it off – if someone was tired after work everyone would still say ‘come out’ – but no-one actually realised it’s a big killer. Now if someone says they’re tired I’ll say ‘stay home, we can catch up another time’.”
WorkSafe Executive Director of Health and Safety Julie Nielsen said the selected campaign cleverly played on a ‘running on empty’ theme to highlight what is a serious issue for young workers on the road.
“WorkSafe congratulates Sasha and Carly on their thought-provoking work, which is helping bring attention to the risk of fatigue among young workers,” she said.
“Young people may be at greater risk of injury from fatigue as research suggests they are more vulnerable to sleep loss, so we hope this campaign can kick-start some important conversations and help young workers stay safe on the road.”
TAC Head of Road Safety Samantha Cockfield said finding new and creative ways to connect with younger people, like through ‘running on empty’, was important in changing road safety behaviour.
“We know young road users are susceptible to driving drowsy and the inherent risks involved, and I am sure that this creative new campaign will strike a chord with young drivers and change the way they think about driving tired.”
Visit reactforchange.com to learn more about the Re:act program.
An initiative of Hard Edge, the annual Re:act program challenges local higher education students to create a behaviour change campaign that raises awareness among 16-25 year old road users of a critical road safety issue where they are overrepresented.
A panel of university or TAFE, road and workplace safety, and industry partners selects the most compelling road safety campaign in each state, which is then developed and launched on university or TAFE campuses and oOh!media’s digital assets, including its landmark billboards.
Now in its sixth year, Re:act ran in 2020 in Melbourne with Swinburne, UTS in Sydney and, for the first time, Brisbane, through QUT. The program also expanded internationally into London, at University of the Arts London. In 2021, the Re:act program will once again run in each of those institutions and grow further in Australia, running in Perth for the first time with Curtin University as well as in TAFE campuses across Australia. There are further plans for international expansion into Europe, the United States and South America.
