As road safety challenges evolve, brands have been looking beyond traditional awareness campaigns to find new ways of influencing behaviour in everyday moments. Allianz Ireland has created 'Seat Belters' to explore how creativity, technology and data could be applied to make safer driving a more natural part of daily life.
With excess speed linked to more than half of fatal road crashes worldwide, road safety today is less about raising awareness and more about driving real-world behavioural change. Allianz says it saw an opportunity to reach drivers through a universal, everyday medium that emotionally connects with people and has been scientifically shown to influence behaviour: music.
Allianz and Forsman & Bodenfors created 'Seat Belters' in collaboration with Spotify with the aim to leverage the streaming platform's application programming interface to create personalised playlists for drivers that only included songs with a lower beats per minute (BPM), specifically under 80 BPM, says Allianz.
Research suggests songs with lower BPM — such as Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran or When The Party's Over by Billie Eilish — can promote steadier heart rates, calmer decisions and increased response time, influencing more relaxed, controlled driving overall, adds Allianz.
"In a world of constant distraction and time pressure, traditional road-safety messages have to compete for attention like never before. Seat Belters reflects a new way insurers like Allianz can influence behaviour — using technology to make safer choices easier by default," says Mark Brennan, Chief Marketing Officer of Allianz Ireland.
"Rather than relying on warnings or shock tactics, the campaign removes friction from everyday driving. By combining personalisation, entertainment and behavioural data, it turns music into an active safety tool, with learnings that extend beyond road safety into wider areas of wellbeing and behavioural change."
'Seat Belters' was launched a year ago with a social-first campaign that quickly accelerated into a global conversation, with nearly 25-million views across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, and over 500 000 engagements across all social platforms, says Allianz.
To date, across Ireland, Austria, Hungary, Australia and the United Kingdom where the campaign ran, the 'Seat Belters' conversation has reached 134-million people with 66 827 users and counting creating a safer driving playlist. Consciously committing to changing their driving behaviours. This equates to more than 5.4-million minutes of safer driving music generated so far, adds Allianz.
Broader marketing and social-behaviour research shows that meaningful engagement, such as clicks, shares and active participation, is strongly linked to later behaviour change. A major meta-analysis found that behavioural engagement is an early, and reliable, sign of action-taking, says Allianz.
"Music sits beside every driver in every car in the world. We realised it can be either a good companion or a bad one. So, we wanted to turn it into a safety message people could listen to every single day," says Damian Hanley, Executive Creative Director of Forsman & Bodenfors.
Allianz concludes that it is currently exploring how the learnings from 'Seat Belters', and the collaboration with Spotify, can further amplify the campaign's playlists and promote safer driving habits.
For more information, visit www.allianz.ie. You can also follow Allianz on Facebook, X, Instagram, or on TikTok.
*Image courtesy of contributor