QBE Insurance Safer Roads Campaign Uses Children to Change Driver Behaviour
QBE Insurance's "Safer Roads" campaign is a 2018 Australian film initiative, created by The Core Agency, that places children from Kilkenny Primary School at the centre of an emotional argument for changing small but dangerous driving behaviours across South Australia.
The campaign launched in Australia in August 2018 and comprises two media assets: a full film and a frames cut, both developed by The Core Agency for QBE Insurance. The central message is direct: if every driver changes one small thing about how they drive, roads can be safer for everyone. That deceptively simple premise gives the campaign its emotional and strategic foundation. Rather than issuing warnings from an insurer's institutional authority, the work delegates the appeal to children, whose vulnerability on and around roads carries a moral weight that no statistic can match.
In Australia, road safety has long been a civic concern addressed by government bodies and advocacy groups. QBE's decision to enter this space as a private insurer represents a deliberate positioning move, aligning the brand with community wellbeing rather than premium products. The campaign ran in South Australia in 2018 as part of a broader "Be Safe on the Road" initiative, according to qbe.com, which also included television commercials, print advertising, films, and a digital platform featuring a driver pledge function. That pledge mechanic is notable: it transforms passive viewership into a behavioural commitment, extending the campaign's reach beyond the screen and into daily driving habits.
The Safer Roads campaign addresses specific unsafe driving behaviours, including texting while driving and speeding, according to campaignbrief.com. These are not abstract risks. They are the documented causes of fatalities on South Australian roads, and framing them through the eyes of children who share those roads with distracted or reckless adults gives the campaign an urgency that conventional road safety advertising frequently fails to achieve. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 58 out of 100, reflecting its emotional clarity and community engagement against a backdrop of limited independently verified performance data.
QBE Insurance held approximately 10.7% market share of Australian car-insurance premiums as of September 2018, according to finder.com.au. That position places the brand as a meaningful but secondary player behind Insurance Australia Group, which held 17.7% market share, and AAI/Suncorp, which held 17.3% market share of Australian car-insurance premiums at the same period, also according to finder.com.au. In a competitive market defined by price comparison and product parity, a campaign that foregrounds social purpose rather than product features is a recognisable strategy for differentiation.
The strategic insight driving Safer Roads is rooted in behavioural psychology rather than risk communication theory. Conventional road safety campaigns in Australia have historically relied on graphic consequences — crash imagery, injury statistics, bereaved families — to deter dangerous driving. QBE and The Core Agency inverted this approach. Instead of confronting drivers with the outcomes of bad decisions, the campaign asks them to consider the people they are most motivated to protect: children. Kilkenny Primary School students became informal ambassadors, bringing family photographs and personal stories into the campaign's emotional architecture, as reported by campaignbrief.com.
The timing was deliberate. South Australia's road toll had reached 100 fatalities by the point the campaign launched in 2018, according to bandt.com.au, creating a genuine civic context for the insurer's intervention. QBE and The Core Agency had been working together since 2015, according to adnews.com.au, and the Safer Roads work represents a tonal departure from the animated platform the two had developed across that earlier period. Where campaigns including "Insurance Box," "Motor," "Send + Switch," and "Home" used recurring characters and accessible animation to demystify insurance products, Safer Roads trades that register for documentary-influenced emotional realism, signalling a maturing of the brand's voice for a higher-stakes subject.
The Safer Roads campaign was directed by The Glue Society, with creative development led by The Core Agency, as reported by campaignbrief.com. The Glue Society is an Australian creative and directing collective recognised for emotionally grounded, cinematically composed work, and their involvement signals an intentional commitment to craft that positions this campaign above standard insurance advertising.
The creative approach centres on children from Kilkenny Primary School in South Australia, who engage with family photographs as emotional prompts. This device is precise in its intention. Photographs carry memory, love, and specificity — they are proof that the people at risk are real and particular, not abstractions. By having children handle and respond to these images on camera, the production generates authentic emotional responses rather than performed ones, a distinction that audiences in Australia and beyond are increasingly capable of detecting and rewarding.
The campaign delivers its central line — "if we can all change one small thing about how we drive, we can all be safe on the road" — through the voices and presences of children rather than through adult narration or graphic warning. This is a meaningful craft decision. The child ambassador construct removes the insurer's corporate voice from the emotional foreground, making the appeal feel communal rather than commercial. In Australia's road safety landscape, where government-produced campaigns have long dominated the category with authority and consequence-based messaging, QBE's approach carves a distinct emotional register.
The campaign's two media assets — the full film and the frames cut — allow the work to operate across different viewing contexts and attention spans, with the frames version suited to digital environments where shorter formats dominate. This dual-asset structure reflects considered production planning rather than a simple edit decision, and it extends the campaign's reach without diluting the central emotional argument.
No verified performance data for the QBE Insurance Safer Roads campaign is publicly available. Metrics including reach, engagement rates, pledge completions, or changes in road safety behaviour attributable to this campaign have not been independently published or cited by QBE Insurance or The Core Agency in sources accessible for this analysis.
Structural analysis, however, supports a reasoned assessment of the campaign's likely effectiveness. The decision to anchor road safety messaging in South Australia — a state with a documented and publicly reported fatality toll at the time of launch, according to bandt.com.au — gave the campaign genuine cultural relevance rather than manufactured urgency. The driver pledge function embedded in the accompanying digital platform, as noted by qbe.com, provided a measurable conversion mechanism that most film-led campaigns lack, transforming emotional engagement into a recorded behavioural commitment.
The choice of The Glue Society as director elevates production quality above category norms for insurance advertising in Australia. The two-asset structure — full film and frames — demonstrates media planning discipline, acknowledging that audience attention varies significantly across broadcast and digital contexts. The involvement of real children from Kilkenny Primary School, rather than professional child actors, adds documentary authenticity that is difficult to replicate and easy for audiences to recognise.
QBE reported a 4% like-for-like gross written premium growth across the Group in 2018, according to intelligentinvestor.com.au, and average premium rates in Australia increased during the same period. While no causal link between the Safer Roads campaign and commercial performance can be drawn from available data, the campaign's positioning as a community-minded intervention supports longer-term brand equity rather than short-term conversion — a structurally appropriate objective for a brand holding QBE's competitive position in the Australian market. The Clapboard Score of 58 out of 100 reflects this balance: strong in purpose and craft, measured in the absence of independently verified outcomes.
The QBE Insurance Safer Roads campaign is a 2018 Australian film initiative created by The Core Agency. It features children from Kilkenny Primary School using family photographs to encourage drivers to change one small driving behaviour. The campaign ran in South Australia and included a digital driver pledge function, according to qbe.com.
The Glue Society directed the QBE Safer Roads film. The Glue Society is an Australian creative and directing collective, brought on by The Core Agency to lead production. Their involvement reflects a deliberate investment in cinematic craft, distinguishing the campaign from conventional insurance advertising in the Australian market, as reported by campaignbrief.com.
QBE Insurance used children to shift the emotional appeal away from consequence-based messaging. Children from Kilkenny Primary School engaged with family photographs on camera, generating authentic emotional responses. This approach positioned vulnerable road users as advocates rather than victims, making the call to change driving behaviour feel personal and community-driven rather than institutional.
The QBE Safer Roads campaign addressed unsafe driving behaviours including texting while driving and speeding, according to campaignbrief.com. These behaviours were directly linked to South Australia's road toll context in 2018. The campaign's central message asked drivers to change one small habit, framing incremental personal responsibility as the collective path to safer roads across Australia.
QBE Insurance and The Core Agency began working together in 2015, according to adnews.com.au. Before Safer Roads, the partnership produced an animated campaign platform spanning work identified as "Insurance Box," "Motor," "Send + Switch," and "Home." Safer Roads represented a significant tonal shift toward emotional realism, departing from the character-driven animation of earlier campaigns.
QBE Insurance held approximately 10.7% market share of Australian car-insurance premiums as of September 2018, according to finder.com.au. This placed QBE behind market leaders Insurance Australia Group and AAI/Suncorp. The Safer Roads campaign's community-focused positioning reflects a strategic approach to brand differentiation in a competitive Australian insurance market defined by product parity.
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