Case Study: The Safety Jingle

46 times a day. That’s the average amount of times radio hosts of popular radio stations engage with their listeners by asking them to call in, text or post. 46 times. But in Belgium 80% of the people listen to the radio while driving their car (source Gfk).

Recent studies show that using your phone behind the wheel triples your chances of having an accident. The organisation Parents of Road Victims wanted to address this issue.

The target audience were all radio hosts of all Belgian national Radio stations. That’s about 25 stations and almost 300 radio hosts.

The planning, campaigning and spreading of the Safety Jingle was completely dependent on the social pressure we would be able to put on the radio hosts to start using the Safety Jingle. So conversation and debate within the general public and press were key. 

Step 1  - The Safety Jingle was recorded with the voices of actual parents who lost a child in a road traffic accident. The music contains the names of the 155 children who died last year.

Step 2 - The Safety Jingle was made available online as a finished track. But to make sure radio hosts could adapt it to the sound-id of their show, we also made an open-source set of audio layers available.

Step 3 - Via a touching online video request directed to Belgium’s most famous radio hosts, actual parents of road victims launched a national call to all radio hosts to start using the Safety Jingle.

Step 4 - The same day, via pre-programmed tweets and posts, all Belgians could send the touching online video request to their favourite radio host.

Step 5 - Use all the attention, conversation and debate in national press to put even more pressure on the radio hosts.

Our KPI was very simple yet ambitious: make all Belgian radio hosts use the Safety Jingle. Once launched, within hours, the first radio hosts responded, live on air, in their radio show. The Safety Jingle quickly became a topic on all national radio stations.

After 1 day only, radio hosts even started encouraging each other to start using the Safety Jingle. After 2 days The Safety Jingle sparked debate and conversation on national TV, radio and press. And after 3 days only, 95% of all national radio stations actively used The Safety Jingle each time a radio host asked to call, text or tweet. 95%. Concretely, that means that 1 radio station did not use it. 

An absolutely fabulous result in an extremely short amount of time: 3 days. Making the Safety Jingle a permanent tool for Radio Hosts to help save lives.

In the meantime The Safety Jingle has also been introduced in Slovenia, Portugal and Italy. With more countries to follow.

Client Ouders van Verongelukte Kinderen / Parents d’Enfants Victimes de la Route
Contacts Koen Van Wonterghem, Ellen Ruys, Alexia Creton
Agency Happiness Brussels
CEO & Strategic Director Karen Corrigan
Managing Director Elke Janssens
CD Geoffrey Hantson, Pieter Claeys, Philippe Fass
Concept Providers Niels Sienaert, Tim Schoenmaeckers
Copy FR Romain Felix, Catherine Quadens
Design Dries Lauwers
Motion Design Remke Faber
Creative Intern Anaïs Desmet
Group Account Director Hans Smets
Account Team Stefanie Drapier, Tine Van Hasselt
Online Producer Tuyet Hoang
Online production Bliss
Agency Producer Bart Vande Maele
Sound Production Raygun
Jingle Composition & Production Peter Baert
Radio Producers Peter Baert en Toon Jansegers
Video Production Geronimo 
Director Dirk Domen
DOP Piet Deyaert
Producer Jasper Moeyaert - Mathias Kerner
Post-Prod Stefaan Gryson (Moxy)
Special Thanks to The Radio Group – Steve Vanaudenaerde (IP) & Catherine Servaes (RMB)