Road crashes remain the leading single cause of death for teenagers 15-19 in New Zealand.

Ironically the most dangerous time is when they’ve passed their first practical test and are on their restricted license.This group are over four times more likely to crash than learner drivers.

Parents can play a critical role in reducing the chance of this happening through actions like supervising their teens driving, even after they’ve got their restricted drivers license and don’t legally need it.

We were tasked with motivating these parents about why to take on this daunting task and empowering them with how to help their teens stay safe, while keeping their sanity.

Insight: Parents are relieved that after years of being their kids ‘taxi service’ and then having endured the trials of teaching them to drive, that their work is [thankfully] done. Meantime having passed their restricted test, the teens just want their independence.

Motivating parents about why and how to get involved is a complex issue, so we needed a way of delivering long-form communications, especially to parents who hadn’t gone onto the website.

To bypass the apathy, we had to change the authorship. Although NZTA are a trusted voice of traditional road safety, they didn't have credibility when it came to parenting - and this was as much about how to talk to kids as it was road safety. NZTA did not need to be the messenger. In fact their overt involvement had the potential to be a turn off.

If we were to pull off long form communication, it had to be credible, entertaining and come from  a trusted voice.

Execution: Our answer was Nigel Latta – NZ’s most entertaining clinical psychologist by miles.

Nigel’s Politically Incorrect Parenting TV series had already dealt with a range of similar psychology issues between parents and kids. Crucially Nigel’s ability in front of a studio audience and his entertaining family role-playing techniques would allow us to get parents and teens engaged on a topic none of them really wanted to talk about.

So we invited Nigel to work with us and extend his series with an additional new episode which went on to be titled ‘Surviving Teen Driving’: funded, but not branded by NZTA. - The perfect mechanic for delivering the long-form content we needed and engaging our audience.

In half an hour, Nigel covered both the problem and a range of actionable solutions from supervision of teens, driving with their friends, driving in different road conditions, parents setting and enforcing rules for teen drivers and much, much more.

Results: For less than the price of producing a modest TVC the programme delivered an outstanding level of viewer engagement with the topic.

544,000 people watched the 23 minute programme (half hour less ads and promos).

That’s 12,673,000 minutes of voluntary engagement with the normally less-than-exciting topic of road safety.

After the TV1 Sunday News; our special episode was the night’s highest rating show of the night in the country. - It ranked in the top 10 programmes in NZ for the week.