2010 Tales of the Road campaign evaluation

The last year has seen a change in approach for road safety advertising to children, moving from broadcast advertising (TV, Internet and other media) to a tightly targeted approach focusing on a limited number of hotspot areas.

The most recent large scale Tales of the Road advertising activity was in 2009 – the 2010 campaign involved small scale targeted activity via football clubs’ community programmes in hot spot areas, plus national distribution of Jazzy Books.

This report covers the findings from research carried out in February 2011, to enable DfT to report back to the ERG and Cabinet Office about the implications of the major change in advertising strategy.

Key findings are:

• Accidents on the road has always topped the list of perceived dangers amongst this age group, with little change since 2009.

• Mentions of drugs, something happening to their parents or friends, and accidents playing sport have all fallen significantly, for the most part back to previous levels.

• Pedestrian accidents are still considered the most likely of the three road accident scenarios, followed by cycling accidents.

• Perceived likelihood of being in an accident whilst in a car has fallen since 2009 (as has mobile phone theft).

• Children aware of the Tales of the Road advertising, either spontaneously or when prompted, thought that all three of the road safety scenarios were more likely to happen to children their age, when compared with children not aware of ToTR, as they did at the first wave of Tales of the Road advertising tracking in 2009.

• Drivers speeding remains the thing children are most concerned about when they are using the roads. Worries about drunk drivers have fallen back since 2009, to a level last seen in 2006.