To convince people to plan for a safe ride home, we decided to put the effects of driving drunk right into drinker’s hands by creating coasters made from the wreckage of motor vehicle accidents.

Each coaster was cut and shaped from actual crashed cars. A message was then laser-etched onto each coaster: “This coaster used to be a car. That car never made it home.”

Physically, the coasters lacked polish. They were crumpled, scratched, and torn up — after all, they were made from car wrecks, and we didn’t want to hide that fact. Even the copy on the coaster was matter-of-fact, lacking a call-to-action: “This coaster used to be a car. That car never made it home.” In essence, they spoke for themselves — and our target audience took notice.

We launched with a small run of 50 coasters at The Emmet Ray, a popular Toronto Bar, and quickly produced 200 more to keep up with demand in the city. In the following weeks, as news of our coasters spread online, we were bombarded with requests for coasters. We openly shared our design, and helped other anti drinking and driving organization from around the world produce their own for their market, helping the idea spread globally.

Over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, we earned over four million free media impressions online, from such notable media outlets as Vice, Fox News, Yahoo!, Global Canada, CTV, and Uproxx. The campaign was also covered on multiple nightly news broadcasts, including some of the most popular broadcasts in our target market of Toronto.

Over that same weekend, our client conducted two on-screen TV interviews, 12 radio interviews, and 8 online interviews, while website traffic increased by over 600% in the same period. In the weeks that followed, requests for coasters came in from over 50 cities worldwide, from Canada to Germany to Australia to Israel. When interviewed, some bar patrons shared that the coasters had convinced them to call ahead and plan for a safe ride home.