Are Boomers or Gen Z The Safer Driver? AAMI Finds Out

Leo Australia's ECD Tim Woolford shares his insights into the creative process behind AAMI' s 'Driving Test' , or ADT. Launched at the end of September this year, the campaign saw Aussies compete to be the safest driver. The AAMI app analysed mobile data to determine which generation drove the safest, and each channel was updated to boast the ongoing winner.

Tim has been with Leo Australia for three years, and ECD for almost one year. Before that, he was at DDB Australia for five years, and has won major awards including Gold Cannes Lions, Effies, and Spikes Grands Prix. 

LBB> What was the launch pad for this campaign -- how did the idea come to be? 

Tim> AAMI, part of Suncorp Group, has been active in the road safety initiatives space for many years now, coming up with innovative ways to tackle this complex problem, so their commitment to this over the last decade or so was, in all honesty, the real launching pad.

However, it’s no secret Australia’s roads are frightfully dangerous, and yet most of the money spent on road safety goes into enforcement. So, we thought, what if we shifted the road safety conversation to make it less like a lecture and more like a leaderboard? We’re taking a different approach to making our roads safe -- by gamifying safe driving and making it engaging, leaning into the competitive nature of the Australian spirit.

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LBB> Road safety is a serious subject, how did you balance the tone when turning it into a competitive national game?

Tim> It’s true that it’s not the most obvious thing to make a game out of. But that was sort of the point. We knew we didn’t want to create a fear-based road safety campaign, so we went the other way. The competitive component is really the big unlock here. Australians are such a fiercely competitive bunch, so tapping into that cultural truth is what we think will help this stick. The trick with all of this, of course, was keeping the fun on the surface while the safety message did the heavy lifting underneath.

It’s a bit of a Trojan horse in that way. Rivalries like ‘dog people versus cat people’ or ‘Sydney versus Melbourne’ or ‘redheads vs blondes’ keep it light, but every bit of banter is underpinned by education and practical ways to make driving safer. To continue to fan the flames of competition and deliver safety messaging, we’re going to update films, OOH, and social —almost every channel—throughout the campaign with how certain cohorts are performing against one another.

So, if boomers are driving better than Gen Z, there’ll be an ad we release that speaks to that result. It’s been a really exciting challenge in that respect, building these responsive media assets based on what the data is telling us.

LBB> Why was the AFL grand final chosen as the launch moment?

Tim> Well, I think if you want to turn safe driving into a national sport, you dream of launching that idea at the grand final of a national sport. It is one of those rare cultural moments when the whole country’s paying attention. They’re rallying behind their own team, they’re trash-talking the other.

It’s the perfect context, timing, and audience to spark up a bit of competition. But, more obviously, it gave us a massive national stage to debut the campaign. Speaking as a footy fan, it was also great to work with Tom De Koning and Aaron Naughton on the launch film. Both were surprisingly hard to convince to talk smack to each other as they lined up at the traffic lights.

LBB> What are the key challenges in using mobile telematics data to score drivers in real time?

Tim> It sounds very technical. The app measures everything from speeding to phone use, acceleration, braking and cornering, all in real time, across tens of thousands of drivers, so it’s no mean feat. But it’s not just the app itself; it’s the data that it has to process, sorting people into their ‘cohorts’, which provides information for us to continue to create content to prime the competition and educate drivers throughout the campaign.

That’s where a lot of the time was spent; the entire AAMI team did an extraordinary job developing the back-end data processing, making all this behavioural data and tech feel invisible and effortless.