Mortal Timeline
INTOUCH Insurance
Issue 36 | September 2015
Agency
BBDO Russia Group, Proximity Russia
Creative Team
Creative Director Nikolay Megvelidze Executive Director Vladlena Obukhova Creative Group Heads Alexey Starodubov Yuri Mikhailov Digital Art Director Alexander Lubavin Digital Designer Kirill Emelyanov
Production Team
Production Company FIBR FILM Production Junior Producer Anna Lukonina
Other Credits
Head Of Client Marketing Department Nataliya Novoshinskaya Group Account Director Albena Kovaneva Strategic Planning Manager Nikita Nikiforov Digital Account Director Elina Yaroslavskaya Senior Account Manager Ekaterina Moskvina Corporate Project Director Boris Sorokin Junior Account Manager Alexandra Bichaeva
Date
April 2015
Background
Every year in Russia, around 200,000 people were injured or killed in traffic accidents. These horrifying statistics did not deter drivers. On the contrary, some of the most viewed films on the internet were crash videos captured on dash-cams.
Idea
The challenge was to take this ghoulish fascination with car accidents and use it to tell a message about safe driving.
A video, entitled "The most terrible fatal car crash ever!" was uploaded to YouTube. For ten minutes, though, what the video showed was the view through the windscreen of a car as it drove legally and safely behind another vehicle.
Only when the user went down into the YouTube timeline to scroll ahead to find the advertised crash more quickly did he see in the thumbnails footage of the car pulling out into the path of an oncoming truck. After that came the message, "Don't rush."
(The way this was done was by inserting frames of the alternative, smashing footage into the primary film at carefully determined intervals. While they were unnoticeable in the normal running of the video, they became apparent in the timeline.)
Results
In just three days with zero media spend, the video became popular not just in Russia but abroad. According to YouTube Analytics, more than 68% of people scrolled the video and saw the message — Don't Rush.
Our Thoughts
This is one of those ‘sucker-punch’ ideas based on a simple observation of how people watch YouTube videos. We all go down into the timeline to see if we can skip ahead to the juicy bits. It looks simple but would have been quite a hefty job to shoot and to edit. A nice new device to use in YouTube though I fear it won’t persuade any drivers to slow down at all.