Source: Adweek
The ongoing “It Can Wait” campaign highlights the dangers of texting and driving, and the various executions have been notably and appropriately well-known for being shocking and heart-wrenching.
But the latest spot, from FCB Cape Town, starts unexpectedly and comically.
It begins with a montage of amusing and fairly benign clips of gaffes made while texting and walking. We see people drop phones, walk into light poles, and ironically stumble over caution signs to a whimsical soundtrack punctuated with cartoonish sound effects.
Then the ad gets pretty grim, pretty fast.
“You can’t even text and walk…” the copy begins. The fanciful soundtrack abruptly stops as a young woman texts and drives, then suddenly the car crashes, tumbling, and the scene ends on her hanging upside down like a rag doll to the sound of a heart monitor flatlining.
The ad ends with “…so why do you text and drive?”
The visuals in the last 15 seconds of the 40-second spot are powerful and brutal. The dichotomy between the fun, internet-shareable “fails” and the reality of the dangers of texting and driving is stark and effective.
The “It Can Wait” campaign is sponsored by AT&T, but this work was created separately, without any AT&T branding, by South Africa’s Western Cape government.
