Taxis Bleus Turns a Seatbelt Into a Christmas Gift for Belgium
Taxis Bleus, the Belgian taxi operator, launched 'The Best Gift' in January 2023, a Design, OOH Outdoor, and Direct campaign created by Brussels agency secondfloor that physically wrapped rear-seat seatbelts in festive gift ribbon, pairing them with an emotional safety message to persuade back-seat passengers in Belgium to buckle up.
The campaign's premise rests on a stark public safety reality. According to Clapboard, fifty percent of people fatally or seriously injured in road accidents were not wearing a seatbelt. Rear-seat passengers represent a consistently overlooked demographic within that figure, and the creative idea turned that neglect into its central narrative. By transforming the seatbelt itself into a gift — the one present that keeps loved ones present — secondfloor gave Taxis Bleus a vehicle to carry a health and transport message through the emotional register of the holiday season.
The campaign entered the market in Belgium during one of the year's highest-traffic cultural moments. Mariah Carey's 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' provided the cultural scaffold: as reported by Ads of the World, the campaign's stated wish for 2023 was that the song would stay in Belgians' heads all year long, extending the buckle-up reflex well beyond Christmas. The single media asset — a gift-wrapped rear seatbelt deployed across Taxis Bleus vehicles — operated simultaneously as ambient OOH outdoor advertising and as a direct behavioural prompt for every passenger who climbed into the back seat. Clapboard scores 'The Best Gift' at 63 out of 100, recognising its creative economy and emotional clarity within the automotive, health, and transport categories.
Rear-seat belt non-compliance is a documented behavioural problem in Belgium. The campaign insight identified that many people assume the back seat is inherently safer and therefore skip the belt entirely, a misconception with lethal consequences on Belgian roads. By anchoring the campaign to Christmas — when families travel together and emotional stakes are highest — secondfloor converted an abstract road safety statistic into a personally resonant human story about absence and loss.
The strategic choice to use Taxis Bleus' own fleet as the primary media channel was deliberate. Every taxi in operation became a live demonstration of the message, reaching passengers at the precise moment they were making the decision whether or not to buckle up. This closed the loop between the OOH outdoor communication and the actual behaviour change the campaign sought to drive across the Belgian market, operating without the distance that conventional billboard or broadcast formats impose between message and moment.
The Brussels taxi market operates under a numerus-clausus licensing system, with approximately 1,300 taxi licences reported in 2021, according to Clapboard's market documentation. Within that regulated and competitive environment, Taxis Bleus operates alongside ride-hailing competitors including Uber and local aggregators. Positioning the brand explicitly around passenger safety and emotional protection — rather than price, speed, or convenience — offered Taxis Bleus a differentiated brand proposition that neither Uber nor smaller Belgian operators had claimed with equivalent creative conviction. As documented by Secondfloor Be, the 2023 campaign marked a deliberate repositioning of the Taxis Bleus brand around the idea that care for passengers extends beyond the journey itself.
The creative execution is built on a single physical intervention. Secondfloor wrapped the rear-seat seatbelts inside Taxis Bleus vehicles with festive gift ribbon and attached an emotional written message, transforming an everyday safety fixture into an object of care and seasonal meaning. The restraint of the idea — one object, one gesture, one message — is what gives it formal strength. There is no secondary visual layer, no illustrated character, no digital augmentation. The seatbelt itself is the creative, and the taxi interior is the gallery.
Production was handled by Toast Agency, with producers Rodolphe de Laminne and Alexandre Tafforeau overseeing delivery, and editor Jérôme Swales shaping the final asset, as documented by Clapboard. The creative direction was led by Marie-Laure Cliquennois and Olivier Bialek of secondfloor, with creation credits shared by Eric Vandamme, Pierre Urbaniak, and Carole Brouwers. Graphic design was executed by Rebecca Valicon, and strategy was overseen by Célia Celili. Agency contact was managed by Michaël Marrocco, with accounting handled by Anaïs Lavie and Olivier Bialek.
The campaign was published on January 15, 2023, as reported by Ads of the World, entering the public record in the immediate aftermath of the Christmas and New Year travel period — a timing that extended the emotional resonance of the holiday message into the new year while road safety remained a live cultural conversation in Belgium. The Design and OOH outdoor formats selected for the campaign reflect the in-vehicle ambient nature of the execution: this is not a campaign that asks for attention from the street; it demands it from within the space where the behaviour needs to change.
No independently verified post-campaign performance data for 'The Best Gift' — such as measured increases in rear-seat belt compliance among Taxis Bleus passengers, earned media reach figures, or brand tracking shifts — is publicly available at the time of this writing. The campaign's effectiveness must therefore be assessed through its structural and strategic logic rather than declared metrics.
The structural case is credible. The campaign operated at the point of decision: a passenger seated in the rear of a Taxis Bleus vehicle, confronted with a gift-wrapped seatbelt, faced the choice to buckle up in a context designed to make refusal feel emotionally incongruous. This is a textbook ambient OOH outdoor intervention — proximate, contextual, and behaviorally specific — and it avoids the attribution gap that plagues broadcast road safety campaigns in Belgium and across the broader European automotive safety communications landscape.
The cultural anchor of Mariah Carey's 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' added a mnemonic layer designed to outlast the Christmas period itself, as noted in the campaign brief documented by Clapboard. If the song lodged in a passenger's memory alongside the image of the gift-wrapped belt, the safety message travelled beyond the taxi ride. The campaign's submission to Ads of the World and its documentation across Sortlist Be and secondfloor.be indicate meaningful industry recognition and peer visibility within the Belgian creative market. Clapboard scores the campaign 63 out of 100, a result that reflects its conceptual economy and emotional intelligence while acknowledging the single-asset scale of the execution.
'The Best Gift' is a 2023 Belgian road safety campaign by Taxis Bleus and secondfloor. It wrapped rear-seat seatbelts in gift ribbon inside Taxis Bleus vehicles, pairing the gesture with an emotional Christmas message to encourage back-seat passengers to buckle up, according to Clapboard.
Brussels agency secondfloor created 'The Best Gift' for Taxis Bleus. Creative direction was led by Marie-Laure Cliquennois and Olivier Bialek, with production managed by Toast Agency. The campaign was published on January 15, 2023, as reported by Ads of the World, and ran across OOH outdoor and Design formats in Belgium.
Rear-seat passengers are a consistently overlooked road safety demographic in Belgium. According to Clapboard, fifty percent of people fatally or seriously injured in road accidents were not wearing a seatbelt. Secondfloor targeted this specific behaviour because back-seat travellers routinely underestimate their own risk on Belgian roads.
The campaign used Mariah Carey's 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' as its cultural framework. Secondfloor's stated wish was that the song would remain in Belgians' heads all year, extending the buckle-up message beyond the holiday season, as documented by Ads of the World and Clapboard.
Taxis Bleus' 'The Best Gift' scores 63 out of 100 on Clapboard. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual economy and emotional clarity within the automotive, health, and transport categories, balanced against the limited single-asset scale of the OOH outdoor execution in Belgium.
Taxis Bleus deployed 'The Best Gift' across Design, Direct, and OOH Outdoor formats in Belgium, as documented by Clapboard. The campaign centred on a single in-vehicle ambient asset — a gift-wrapped rear seatbelt — making every Taxis Bleus taxi a live media channel at the exact moment passengers made their buckle-up decision.
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