If there’s one ad that does, at least, get my attention - it’s the one with the guy pulling up to the road toll booth and asking the creepy guy inside what’s going on, and he says it’s a road toll and when the driver asks how much - the creepy guy says something along the lines of “just the little one today”.
It gets my attention. But I can honestly say that it never enters my mind when I’m out on the road. Nor does the other one with all the people climbing out of the car. Nor does the Road to Zero slogan, actually.
Of course, I like to think that I’m a careful driver. But how much I can put that down to all the road safety advertising I’ve been hit with over the years, I don’t know. Probably not a lot, actually.
I think just wanting to keep myself and anyone else travelling with me safe is why I do what I can to avoid trouble.
But, of course, not everyone is like that and so, for years, the Government and its agencies have been pouring truckloads of money into advertising to ram home some pretty basic road safety messages.
But after the seven tragedies over the last two days, we’ve got the police saying today that those messages just aren’t getting through.
Sadly, though, this won’t be the last time that we hear this from the police. Because the Government and Waka Kotahi will continue to pour truckloads of money into its advertising campaigns - even though we’ve got the police today pretty much saying that they don’t work.
If they did work, we wouldn’t be talking about six people dying on the roads in just a couple of days.
This is why I’m more than convinced that the Government and Waka Kotahi need to come up with something different. Stop wasting money on ads that don’t work, and spend it in a way that’s likely to have a much greater impact.
If you need convincing that the Government has got things way out of kilter, consider this. It’s spending $2 billion on its Three Waters project because 45 people were hospitalised and four people are thought to have died because of contaminated water supplies up in Hastings. $2 billion. And we all know, it’ll be a lot more than that.
So 45 people end up in the hospital and four people are thought to have died, and the Government spends $2 billion.
Nearly twice as many people die on the roads in just a couple of days and, overall, the road toll this year is looking set to be one of the worst in years. Yet what does the Government do? Pour money into advertising that isn’t working and hasn’t worked for years.
This is why I’m saying that the Government and Waka Kotahi need to pull the plug on the ads and put some decent money into making our roads safer.
For me, the best thing they could do is spend money on median barriers. Not just on the highways, either. I reckon median barriers on some of the busiest urban streets as well would be a game-changer.
If there were median barriers in these areas, you wouldn’t get these idiots racing out of the intersections and doing those stupid right-hand turns that put them and others in danger.
So that’s one thing that I think the Government should be doing, instead of wasting money on advertising that the Police are saying today isn’t working.
Because after seven deaths in just a couple of days, it is time to do things differently - way differently - if this Road to Zero thing is going to be anything more than just a bonanza for the advertising agencies.
