WAFLA & AMV on Distracting Drivers with Pink Kittens

When you think of road safety ads, kittens are probably not the first thing which springs to mind. Especially pink ones. (Unless, perhaps, they've been squashed by a distracted driver). Nor would you expect an agency to award the job to a pair of music video directors best known for Pharrell's Happy.

But that's exactly what AMV BBDO have done with their fresh, fun but ultimately thought-provoking campaign for the Department for Transport's THINK! website. Eschewing the shock tactics of previous campaigns, they've enlisted Parisian directing duo, We Are From LA, to create a clever spot that feels more like a cool promo for an up-and-coming band... which features no less than 100 pink kittens.

Watch the spot below and read on for a Q&A with the directors and the creative team.

Jay Phillips & Neil Clarke, creative directors, AMV BBDO

What was the brief from DfT?

Jay Phillips: To target the millennial generation: 25-year-olds who spend more time with their mobile phones than anything else, looking at Facebook and memes, even while they’re driving.

And what was the inspiration for the spot?

JP: We weren’t really inspired by [any] other commercials, we wanted to really emulate music videos and the music video world, because our target [audience] is primarily 25-year-olds, so we wanted to do something that was going to engage and talk to them in a way - and in a medium - they’d understand.

Why did you decide to move away from the style of the previous DfT campaigns?

JP: Growing up, the target audience will have seen all the previous DfT ads, so they’re desensitised to those sorts of shock tactics. So we didn’t want to show the crash itself, but instead show something that’s going to make them think and interact with the campaign.

Neil Clarke: The road safety ads of the past have been very successful, they’ve saved lots of lives. But for this campaign we’re talking to a millennial audience, so we needed to find a way of reaching them that was different and fresh – one that wasn’t so much about telling people what to do and preaching at them, but making them think instead about the consequences of their actions.

The ad was shot in one take – tell us a bit about the production process.

JP: The advert is a slow-motion extravaganza. [The car] is going down the road at 30 mph, and it took about 2.3 seconds to clear the entire scene, but we’ve slowed that down using a Phantom camera, so the whole story plays out over a minute, a minute and a half. Within the scene itself there are loads of rich and interesting actions happening.

What made We Are From LA the right directors for the job?

NC: The treatment we got from We Are From LA really stood out on the page, it was so colourful and special, and the idea of using hundreds of pink kittens was really magical. Doing it all in one take, while it’s technically more challenging, adds an extra layer of craft and cleverness that’s hopefully going to make people want to watch it again and again – how many pink kittens can you spot on repeat viewings?

We Are From LA, directors

What was the brief from the agency?

The brief was super cool and simple, the agency wanted to make the viewer realise that the fact that two or three seconds is a really short time and when you are driving and not looking at the road, you are missing so much.

What specific problems did you face in shooting this ad?

We wanted to shoot almost everything in-camera to be as realistic as possible, but it was not easy to choreograph every action and to catch the car and the cellphone at the best moment, all in one take. We had 100 hidden pink kittens and about 30 different scenarios lined up along the street.

It was exciting to shoot it because the camera was mounted on a motorbike with a special rig, driven by a stunt driver - and at 30mph everything goes really fast - so we needed to queue every action to happen at the right moment in these two-three seconds of shooting! Not to mention we added in kids, a horse, some chickens, pigeons and a dog to play with...

How did you decide what actions and incidents you wanted to happen during the shoot?

We wanted to stay realistic but although unexpected. We really wanted the viewer to discover a lot of surprising situations in slow motion that he did not see during the first 2,3 seconds

What inspired your treatment?

We really like the video series Stainless by photographer Adam Magyar, where he shoots people in slow motion when a train is coming into New York's Grand Central station. It’s almost like a painting and it capture the rawness of life in a magic moment.

What previous road safety ads have you really liked or not liked?

We are not big fans of safety ads when they are overly dramatic because they create more of a distance for us. We prefer ads that are more real and play with us, and at the same time hit our emotions, like this one.

What is your favourite ad of all time?

There are a lot, but Levi’s Odyssey by Jonathan Glazer is a masterpiece that never ages.