Transport Accident Commission's Towards Zero campaign by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne used a live social experiment to argue that zero road deaths is a worthy goal
Transport Accident Commission Towards Zero Reframes Road Safety
Transport Accident Commission's "Towards Zero — There's no one someone won't miss" is a 2015 public service film campaign created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, launched in Victoria, Australia, in August 2015, that uses a live social experiment to argue that even a single road death is unacceptable by confronting one man's casual acceptance of seventy road deaths with seventy people who would miss him.
The campaign launched as the first major executional phase of TAC's broader Towards Zero platform, a long-term road safety initiative built on the proposition that the only acceptable number of road fatalities on Australian roads is none. As noted by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne Planner Matt Pearce, speaking to Contagious, the team started with the idea of "there's no one someone won't miss" as a way to create belief that zero is a worthy goal. This marked a deliberate philosophical departure from the TAC's earlier tradition of confronting audiences with graphic crash consequences, shifting instead toward an emotionally affirmative framework that makes road safety personal rather than cautionary.
The campaign ran across television, radio, online, social media, outdoor, and out-of-home channels in Australia during Phase 1, which ran from 26 August to 20 September 2015, according to Tac Vic Gov Au. A second phase, titled "Then and Now," launched on 4 November 2015, revisiting TAC's landmark 1994 Kombi scenario with a contemporary lens. The central creative device of Phase 1 — placing a man who had suggested seventy road deaths might be acceptable face-to-face with seventy people important to him — gave the film its emotional and argumentative core. The finished film runs at approximately sixty seconds, according to awardonline.com, and was submitted to awards consideration in 2015. Clapboard rates this campaign 76 out of 100, reflecting strong creative intent, proven media reach, and meaningful cultural contribution to Australia's road safety conversation.
Transport Accident Commission has operated within Australia's road safety communication landscape since its advertising programme began in 1989, two years after the organisation was established in 1987, according to tac.Vic Gov Au. For much of that history, TAC campaigns relied on visceral depictions of crash consequences to shift driver behaviour, a convention shared by road safety bodies across comparable markets including New Zealand's New Zealand Transport Agency and the United Kingdom's Think! road safety programme. By 2015, TAC had identified an emerging creative and strategic problem: audiences had grown familiar with the shock-based formula, reducing its capacity to generate genuine emotional engagement.
Matt Pearce, Planner at Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, articulated the strategic pivot directly to Contagious: "It was important for us to find a new way to talk about vulnerability and make people notice it again without relying on the old shock tactics." The insight driving "Towards Zero" was that abstract road toll statistics — including the number seventy, representing a possible annual fatality benchmark — carry little moral weight until they are made human and personal. The campaign's answer was to transform a number into a crowd of irreplaceable individuals, each one representing someone who would grieve a specific loss.
In Australia, government campaign-media placement across federal departments and agencies totalled A$107.1 million in FY2014–15, according to Finance Gov Au, rising to A$174.7 million in FY2015–16 — an increase of approximately 63.1 percent year-on-year, also per finance.gov.au. This expanding investment in public communication underscores the competitive environment for audience attention that TAC's campaign entered. Against that backdrop, Clemenger BBDO Melbourne's decision to anchor the campaign in relational empathy rather than fear differentiated "Towards Zero" from both domestic government communications and international road safety advertising norms of the period.
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne built the creative execution of "Towards Zero" around a documentary-style social experiment format, a structural choice that gave the film its claim to authenticity and emotional credibility. The central scene involves a real individual being asked whether a hypothetical road toll of seventy deaths per year would be acceptable, and then being confronted, in person, by seventy people whose lives are connected to his own. The power of the execution rests entirely on this confrontation being unscripted and observable, allowing the subject's visible reckoning with the human cost behind a statistical abstraction to carry the argument the campaign needed to make.
Matt Pearce, serving as Planner at Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, confirmed to Contagious that by 2015 the "Towards Zero" platform had already seen multiple creative iterations, describing the "There's no one someone won't miss" film as "probably the third iteration cementing this idea of Towards Zero." This positions the film not as a standalone creative act but as a disciplined development of a platform idea refined over several campaign cycles. The filmmaking approach privileges reaction over narration, using the subject's dawning recognition as the film's emotional climax rather than any voiceover exhortation.
Production credits for the broader "Towards Zero" campaign include Clemenger BBDO Melbourne as the creating agency, with Matt Pearce documented in the planning role, as recorded by selfstorming.com. The film's approximately sixty-second runtime, confirmed by awardonline.com, reflects a considered editorial discipline: enough time to establish premise, execute the confrontation, and deliver a clear platform message, without overstaying the emotional moment the experiment generates. The campaign was distributed as a film medium asset across Australia's television, online, and social channels, allowing the documentary register to function credibly across both broadcast and digital contexts.
Transport Accident Commission committed documented media investment across both phases of the "Towards Zero" campaign. According to tac.vic.gov.au, Phase 1 carried a media spend of A$880,062.17, running from 26 August to 20 September 2015 across television, radio, online, social media, outdoor, and out-of-home channels in Australia. Phase 2, launched on 4 November 2015, carried a media spend of A$1,060,493.90, also per tac.vic.gov.au. Together the two phases represent a combined documented media investment of approximately A$1.94 million across a single campaign platform year.
The campaign received industry recognition in Australia, winning an AWARD Awards Bronze in the Film and Video — Television Commercials, Individual Over 30 Seconds category in 2015, as confirmed by awardonline.com. This award acknowledgement places the campaign within documented peer assessment of creative excellence in Australian advertising for that year.
No independently verified audience reach, recall, or behavioural impact data for the "Towards Zero — There's no one someone won't miss" film is publicly available beyond these figures. Structurally, however, the campaign demonstrates several attributes associated with durable public service effectiveness: a clearly falsifiable central argument, a creative device that generates organic shareability through its social experiment format, a consistent platform identity across multiple phases, and a media plan spanning both mass broadcast and targeted digital environments in Australia. These structural qualities, combined with its documented industry recognition and media investment, inform Clapboard's rating of 76 out of 100 for this campaign.
Transport Accident Commission's "Towards Zero" is a 2015 Australian public service campaign created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne. It used a live social experiment to argue that zero road deaths is the only acceptable goal, confronting one man with seventy people important to him after he suggested seventy deaths might be acceptable.
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne created the Towards Zero campaign for Transport Accident Commission. Matt Pearce served as Planner on the project, according to selfstorming.com. The campaign launched in Victoria, Australia, in August 2015 as a film medium execution distributed across television, online, and social media channels.
The Towards Zero campaign won an AWARD Awards Bronze in the Film and Video — Television Commercials, Individual Over 30 Seconds category in 2015, according to awardonline.com. The award recognised the campaign's creative execution as a film asset running at approximately sixty seconds in the Australian market.
Transport Accident Commission invested A$880,062.17 in media for Phase 1, which ran from 26 August to 20 September 2015, according to tac.vic.gov.au. Phase 2 carried a spend of A$1,060,493.90, launching 4 November 2015. Combined media investment across both phases totalled approximately A$1.94 million in Australia.
TAC identified that shock-based crash imagery had lost its power to generate genuine audience engagement. As Planner Matt Pearce told Contagious, the team needed a new way to talk about vulnerability without relying on old shock tactics, leading to the emotionally affirmative social experiment format that defined Towards Zero.
Phase 1 of the Towards Zero campaign distributed across television, radio, online, social media, outdoor, and out-of-home channels in Australia, according to tac.vic.gov.au. This multi-channel approach allowed the documentary-style film to reach both mass broadcast audiences and targeted digital audiences across the Australian market simultaneously.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
