Utah Department of Transportation

How Our Controversial Super Bowl Ad Flipped the Script on Utah’s Seat Belt Laws

Challenge

For more than a decade, traffic safety advocates in Utah hit a political brick wall trying to pass a primary seat belt law. Under Utah’s old secondary law, police couldn't pull a driver over just for being unbelted; they had to catch them committing another offense first. Every year, a new bill was introduced to fix this; every year, Utah's ultra-conservative House of Representatives blocked it. Their defense? Personal freedom. Lawmakers insisted that choosing not to buckle up only affected the person making that choice.

Our focus groups put the real obstacle in plain language: people genuinely believe they're the only one at risk.

Over five years, more than half of the 1,177 people killed on Utah roads weren't wearing a seat belt.

Since 83 percent of Utahns buckle up, that means the 17 percent who don't were producing the majority of the state's fatalities.

States with primary laws have about 12 percent higher seat belt use.

An unbuckled seat belt with its latch and buckle pulled apart

Solution

We identified research in a journal stating that an unbelted occupant raises the risk of injury or death for everyone else in the car by 40 percent. Our strategy was to shatter the "personal freedom" excuse, prove that unbelted drivers endanger everyone in the car, and set the stage to pass a primary seat belt law.

We bought Utah-market time in Super Bowl XLVIII, right before the third quarter, and aired a spot called "Twist." It opens on a scene first responders know well. A young child, motionless in his car seat after a crash. He looks like he's asleep. The twist is that he's dead, and the thing that killed him was his own parent in the driver's seat, unbuckled, thrown backward into him on impact.

We knew exactly how ugly the reaction would be. That was the point. A morbid ad in the middle of the year's most-watched, most-cheerful ad break was going to get argued about, and every one of those arguments would be a conversation about whether not buckling up can hurt someone else. Controversy was the distribution channel.

“Twist” Super Bowl spot: a young child motionless in his car seat after a crash

The Results

The spot reached close to half a million Utahns aged 18 to 49 during the game. Within 24 hours, sentiment analysis of the social conversation came back 81 percent positive and 19 percent negative, which was a higher positive split than anyone braced for. Every news outlet in Utah covered it, and AdWeek picked it up. A survey three months later found 86 percent of respondents recalled the specific message that an unbelted person can kill or injure someone else in a crash, and 72 percent of them said the ad influenced them to always buckle up.

Winner
Emmy
Award

Real Change Happens

Law enforcement officers and officials gathered on the Utah State Capitol steps

The floor debate among Utah’s legislature showed the argument had moved. Lawmakers who'd voted no before said out loud that they'd changed their minds once they understood they might be the thing that kills the person behind them. That's the exact frame we set out to build, and Utah’s seat belt law became a primary enforcement law.