Safe and Sound

The brief for this project revealed some shocking research: namely, children from deprived areas are five times more likely to be involved in road accidents than kids from more affluent suburbs. Armed with this knowledge, our client, the Ministry of Transport funded Neighbourhood Road Safety Initiative (NRSI), decided to do something about it. They commissioned Stardotstar to create a road safety pack aimed directly at 10-12 year olds.

We began with the target market: if we were to get hard-to-reach children to grapple with such a serious issue, we had first to engage them before we start on the education. Once we had them hooked, in this case with a series of cartoons and games, teachers and parents would stand a chance of getting the road safety message across. Approaching it any other way would create a worthy educational product – but not one whose message was taken on board by children.

Our own focus groups revealed that music and DJ-ing appealed to children from all backgrounds, so we created two aspirational cartoon characters: by day just two ordinary school kids like you and me, but by night the top under 12 sound system in the Northwest! There’s another character, too, Sound’s deeply uncool Dad. Played by John Thomson, Dad consistently gets things wrong, not knowing, for example, that b-boying by the side of a busy road is not only dreadfully embarrassing, it’s also somewhat dangerous. John Thomson isn’t the only well-known voice to appear on Safe and Sound: the CD-Rom also features cameos by hip hop duo, Metz n Trix, as well as BBC radio presenters Mark Radcliffe and Mark Riley.

Safe and Sound was a huge success. An initial print run of 3,000 CDs was increased to 58,000, followed by another 32,000 six months later (over 90,000 CDs in all – that’s more than a Number 1 single!). Third party evaluation concluded it engaged the audience, taught important road safety messages and was useful in the classroom. And Safe and Sound achieved industry recognition: it was awarded three national BIMA awards (the BAFTAs for interactive media) – seeing off competition from the likes of the BBC, Channel 4, MTV and the Natural History Museum.

For Stardotstar, the project isn’t over. We are currently looking to expand the product into new areas of personal safety, such as digital safety, one of the most pressing concerns for parents today.