Our plan was simple: create a video that doesn’t preach against distracted driving, but that powerfully illustrates the devastating impact of our choices. In order to do this, we decided to create a small social experiment and film the results.

On the day of the experiment, we sat each teen in an empty room and listened while they joked about sending Snapchats and texting crushes. Open and forthright, their responses aligned with what the research shows: Teens know distracted driving is wrong, and they do it anyway.

Then we introduced Jacy Good who told the story of getting hit by a distracted driver on the evening of her college graduation, killing her parents and leaving her partially paralyzed.

Next, we asked each teen to look at Jacy and give her the same reasons why they sometimes drove distracted. Things got uncomfortable, but in a powerful way.

With only a production budget of $20,500 and no paid media, we had to engineer consumer sharing. Instead of seeing the budget as a restraint, we embraced the need to strip down production to basics and focused on the real emotion the teens felt during the social experiment. Once the video was ready, we posted on the YouTube channel @SummerBreak, sponsored by AT&T, reaching their passionate young audience and reached out to Facebook influencers with track records of posting videos relating to social good encouraging them to personalize the video for their own channel by doing custom edits. As soon as the video was shared by a few of these influencers, people began to share, comment, like, and even repost as if it was their own. Rather than claim copyright infringement, we encouraged fans to continue to post and tracked the progress of the videos as best we could.

Within 48 hours of release “It Can Wait” was trending on Facebook and had gone viral making the front page of Reddit. To date, the video has been shared more than 5.2 million times and has garnered over 237 million views across social platforms. Viewers left comments like “I cried so hard. Everyone who drives needs to watch this. I really do believe this will save lives.”

It was covered by press outlets like Teen Vogue, Adweek, Fox, and Uproxx and has been used in school curriculums around the globe. Perhaps best of all is that thousands of consumers commented that after seeing the video they took the “It Can Wait” pledge, which has been statistically linked to lowering the rate of deaths due to distracted driving.