"We'll miss you" A Huge Safety Campaign for Správa železnic
Every year, Správa železnic carries out a safety campaign - but this time, with the help of Brainz, the campaign switched the usual railroad to several tracks at once. Starring: AI, Linda Rybová, strong emotions, and social networks. And above all, the power of simple stories.
A Safety Campaign That Hits Hard Like a Steam Locomotive
The challenge
Public education is a "yuck" word. Kind of like ironing – it has to be done, but no one wants to do it. How do we shine a light on rail safety from an angle that will appeal to more than just railfans and overprotective parents?
The solution
If you don't want to lecture, don't do it like a teacher. Instead of long "lessons," we used the power of images and emotions. We turned social media illustrations into "real-life horror stories" and sat the audience of national TV & online and offline campaigns on an imaginary empty chair.
AN EMPTY CHAIR FULL OF EMOTIONS
At Brainz, every project starts with a meeting called Discovery Lab. We took extensive and multi-layered topic SŽ brought to the table (from safety in technical terms to mental health) and narrowed it down to 2 lines here:
1.
Online social media information campaign on individual risks (the "safety eight").
2.
A mainstream campaign that doesn't shock but evokes strong and clear emotions by bringing painful stories of loss to a personal level.
1.
(not so)
funny
facts
SŽ already had extensive visual material from its previous campaigns.
We took these ready-made drawings and transformed them into animations and created short spots combining everyday situations (cartoon) with shock editing (real footage) and punchy "fun facts" (that are actually not funny at all).
Fresh aesthetic, yet simple and readable message. The spots have generated huge buzz on social media.
2.
AN EMPTY CHAIR FULL OF EMOTIONS
We came up with an overarching symbol that perfectly captured the title of the campaign “We'll miss you”. Empty chairs left behind by those who will never undo their mistake.
Suggestive but not shocking, the campaign aims to awaken the viewer's empathy.
We've worked with simple images of chairs in environments that suggest specific stories. Based on real stories (we didn't use literally because of the privacy of the bereaved), we came up with several versions of them. We illustrated these using AI visual tools that allowed us and the client to fine-tune them.
HOW TO "SHOOT" AN AI SPOT
We used the artistic possibilities of creating environments using AI, which we then set in motion in the post-production process.
It was a challenge but we've learned to use the potential of AI tools and saved a lot of money.
The whole process had a completely different dynamic than a traditional film production.
The specific process of working with AI tools was described by our creative strategist Jakub Smoljak for Marketing and Media as follows: "First we had to train the GPT-4 and LaMDA language models to be able to write inputs for other tools that already create graphical visuals (Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, DALL-E). The outputs from these were then manually retouched, after which the next AI input came in the form of creating "spatial maps" that give flat photos a semblance of depth.”
Did robots do everything?
Nah, not at all. VFX and AI creator Vit Fekiac described the final ratio of human and "artificial" input in the creative as "20 percent AI and 80 percent human."
impact?
explosive
Have our concepts and chosen means proven to work?The short answer – yes, they did!
We kicked off a social media campaign with an extremely successful video about the electric arc (Invisible Killer), which has been seen by about 300,000 unique users on Instagram alone and earned over 4,000 likes to this date.
Other videos also earned thousands (of views) and higher hundreds (of likes) even though the media budget was super low (hundreds of Euros).
The main 360° campaign could have been seen for several weeks at train stations across the country. The microsite budesnamchybet.cz was visited by thousands of visitors over three weeks, and 10 percent of them filled out the safety quiz and/or downloaded the "safety eigh." The television spots had a reach of approximately 8,559,000 viewers. Did this campaign have a positive effect on the number of accidents on the railways? We will see next year, but we hope so!