A campaign built around the simple idea that the best moment to change behaviour is the moment behaviour needs to change.
Young male drivers are notoriously difficult to reach with road safety messaging. They overestimate their abilities, underestimate changing road conditions, and have developed a natural resistance to being told how to drive. Traditional public safety advertising wasn’t cutting through.
Instead of creating another government campaign, we created something that felt like culture.
UNXPECTD FM is a fictional pirate radio station designed to hijack audio streams at the exact moment drivers needed to hear it most,
Using real-time weather data, the campaign dynamically adapted every audio placement to local driving conditions. If rain started falling, the station referenced rain. If temperatures dropped and ice became a risk, the creative changed instantly. Wind, black ice, wet roads — every execution responded to the environment the listener was actually driving through.
The result was media that behaved less like advertising and more like a timely interruption.
But relevance alone wasn’t enough,the voices had to feel authentic to the audience. Rather than using authority figures, the campaign featured Hugo Chegwin (DJ Beats from the cult BBC comedy series People Just Do Nothing) alongside Kadeem Ramsay (Kit from the Netflix drama Top Boy.
Both actors brought credibility with a hard-to-reach audience and their pirate-radio banter felt familiar, entertaining and culturally relevant, allowing serious safety messages to land without sounding like a lecture.
The station appeared across Spotify, DAX and digital radio platforms, interrupting normal listening with weather-responsive broadcasts that reflected the road conditions ahead.
The impact was felt. 42% of exposed listeners reported changing their driving behaviour after hearing the creative, plus, the award-winning campaign was later re-run by THINK!.
Client: Department for Transport - Think!
Agency: VML UK
Executive Creative Director: Nick Rowland
Creative Director: Frances Cooke
Lead Creatives: Pete Bastiman & Bish
Creatives: Ryan Timms & Lucy Green
Agency: Wavemaker
Executive Creative Director: Ann Wixley
Creative Lead: Kurt Strong